Dr. Dog is not a hip-hop group, though it has been mistaken for one.

Dr. Dog is not famous, though they have shared the stage with The Strokes, The Raconteurs and My Morning Jacket.

Dr. Dog is just a band from Philadelphia about to embark (pardon the pun) on a nationwide tour in support of its upcoming album, We All Belong. In this week's Q&A, bassist Toby "Tables" Leaman discusses the current state of the band.

Q: You guys are about to go on a big tour. Is this the biggest tour you've done so far?

A: It isn't the longest. I think at one time, five weeks is probably the longest. We're going to be pretty much February to July pretty heavily, maybe with a break in between.

Q: Do you guys like to tour a lot, or is that just something you have to do?

A: I like to play. I like playing in front of different people. Touring is tough. It's not the kind of thing you really look forward to anymore. But this tour we're real psyched about because we're finally going to be able to play some new material. We've been playing the same set for, like, three years now, because when we did Easy Beat, before we recorded that, we'd been playing those songs for like a year. And then we recorded it and then we were still playing those songs. And then we finally got picked up and then we had to tour those songs. So we were playing the same songs over and over again...which is fine, but now we're finally going to be able to do some different material. Because it's sort of pointless, I feel, like if you're going to go out on the road and play songs people have never heard or never had access to. We had tons of songs ready to go, but I feel like it's kind of stupid to play songs nobody has any clue of. Like, they can't even go out and get them.

Q: Do you think the new material is going to be more fulfilling to play on the road?

A: Well, yeah, I do. It's tougher. The music is a little more ambitious. And it also might just seem tougher because we just started trying to play these songs. I don't know if the songs themselves are better or anything like that, but at least on our end, it'll be really nice to play new stuff.

Q: Where'd you record the new album?

A: We have a studio in Philly, and it's just a big room. We have a two-inch tape machine and a 24-channel mixing board and all that kind of stuff. And we split the studio with a friend of ours.

Q: It's your own studio?

A: Yeah. Even when we did Easy Beat we had a reel-to-reel eight-track and that was in Zach [Miller's], our keyboard player's basement. So we've always sort of had one, but never a proper one like this one. It's got a bunch of crap in there, a big piano and all that stuff. It's nice.

Q: Having come from Philadelphia, do you think there's a disadvantage as a band? It seems like the industry is more focused on New York.

A: We've been pretty lucky with everything. There are definitely very few choices of labels in Philly. There's Silk Breeze, and I'm not even sure Silk Breeze is around anymore. And there's what, two papers? [Philadelphia] Weekly, and Citypaper. Obviously there aren't as many venues or anything. I like it. There's a billion bands. I mean, there's a billion bands in Philly, too. But New York is just like, so many bands. And it's also cool that you can just go up there and play and it's not that far away. It's really not that big of a deal. But there are definitely more opportunities up there. I would never want to live there though. That town is…just too many people.

Q: Do you still have a connection to Philadelphia?

A: Four of us live within a few blocks of each other, and Frank [McElroy (guitar)] just lives across the river in Jersey.

Q: Do you still play more shows there?

A: We haven't been just because we've been touring so much. But I would like to play more. Before we toured, we played a bunch in Philly. And before Dr. Dog got going, Scott [McMicken (guitar/vocals)]and I were in this band called Raccoon and we played Philly relentlessly. Three, four times a week sometimes. The music scene in Philly is actually pretty good. There's a lot of decent bands. I hope it gets some national attention because the bands in Philly, as far as towns go, I feel like Philly's real strong.

Q: How did you guys get your jump start out of Philadelphia?

A: Scott went to a My Morning Jacket show and gave Jim James a CD, which was The Psychedelic Swamp. It was just like an amalgamation of stuff we had done on the eight-track. It wasn't a proper album or anything. And he gave it to Jim and then Jim loved it. He wrote us a letter and he was like, 'You guys want to tour?' Absolutely! So yeah, that was it. That was our first tour, with them. And it was awesome, one of my favorite bands.

Q: And then it was the Strokes after that?

A: Well, we played a couple shows with them. We didn't really tour with them. We've been really lucky with tours. I mean, people have just offered us tours. The Raconteurs offered us a tour, and Architecture in Helsinki, and Clap Your Hands [Say Yeah], and The Magic Numbers. People have just sort of given us tours.

Q: Was the Clap Your Hands Say Yeah thing kind of a Philadelphia connection?

A: I didn't really know Alex [Ounsworth] before. The first time we ever played, before they blew up, we were both playing at Piano's in New York, which is a tiny, tiny, tiny club. And it was packed. We liked them and they liked us, and Alex came to see us more. We have the same booking agent, too. Sort of after they broke and stuff and went to Europe, we went to Europe with them. Now we're real close. He just got married and we just played their wedding last week. He has a house now in Conshohocken with his wife. It's an awesome place. But yeah, he was playing solo stuff, so I sort of knew he existed, but we weren't friends or anything.

Q: Where'd you guys pick up your style growing up?

A: Scott and I have been playing together since 8th grade, and we're 27 now, so we've been playing together for a really, really long time. I don't know, we always wrote our own material. We never did covers or anything. You just go through bands and just like glean a little bit from whatever you're into at the time. But yeah, it's not like we consciously decided, 'This is what kind of band we're gonna sound like.' It just happened to be these are the kind of songs that we write, this is the kind of production we like. And the nice thing about this band is we can pretty much write whatever kind of song we want and find a way to make it work. I don't feel like we're too bound up or tied up in a certain genre or anything like that.