IT may be the defining disease of the late twentieth century, but Grant Lee Phillips certainly ain't suffering from any form of identity crisis.

On the contrary, he's fully aware of the fact that he is a Buffalo who doesn't want to be a dinosaur. Why? Because he also knows enough to know that the nearer we slouch towards the next millennium, the more we'll be looking back, to weed out the century's charlatans, particularly in the world of the arts.

Hence the hope that his group, Grant Lee Buffalo won't disappear like those doddering dinosaurs who will, no doubt, be relegated to rock's Jurassic Park "Deservedly, in many cases" he suggests. They have become musically extinct, which is even more of a danger to the latest breed of bands, too many of who seem content merely to "mimic their predecessors".

"That's absolutely what is happening, in many cases," Phillips claims, speaking on the phone from Los Angeles. "We've managed to hurtle a lot of the dinosaurs of the 1960s out, and replace them with the dinosaurs of the 1970s. But, like I say, it really is as though, as we near the end of this Millennium, we're letting the film of our lives run past at high speed, trying to make sense out of everything that came before us, trying to figure out what to stick into our luggage, what we're going to carry forward into the next thousand years.

"I definitely want Grant Lee Buffalo to be on that train into the next aeon! So we're very careful about the music we allow to influence what we do."

One thing Phillips won't be sticking into his luggage, as he heads for Ireland, is the 1960s Orbit synthesiser he pushed home "on rollers" after finding it in a thrift shop.

"That's true! You won't see me pushing that thing through the streets of Dublin!" he says, laughing.

"We never can bring on tour as many instruments as we haul into the studio for albums like our latest, Copperopolis. In the past we've always gravitated towards more arcane instruments, as they seem to have individual personalities that are susceptible to the human touch. Which you don't get off today's instruments, which have a more homogeneous sound. But the discovery of this organ, which produces space age lounge music, was just a foil against our more organic way of working.

"We said, 'screw all the banjos and mandolins for a while, let's see if we can conjure up another galaxy'."

By now, most readers will have realised that Grant Lee Phillips is quite a "spacey" guy, right? And yet, despite all this talk of travelling through galaxies and aeons, the geographic space Grant Lee Buffalo really is trying to recreate on their new album is very specifically the American town of Copperopolis, once a thriving copper mining town. Not surprisingly, perhaps, Phillips claims he "finds inspiration in decay". Nowhere is this culturally commendable aesthetic better articulated than in Bethlehem Steel, which tells of a "light, blue as a welder's torch" and a time when "our mother's father worked here in World War Two/On the main floor/Operating the drill". So is this Grungy folk music or what?

"Like America, our music is very much a melting pot, with an element of tradition to what we do, sure though we have been quite irreverent to that tradition!" he explains. "Yet it is roots music. As in folk, country, blues, a lot of the stuff that grew out of the South, particularly the Appalachians, which is a byproduct of the music that came from Europe, including Ireland, right?

"Yet I've also lived in LA for 11 years and travelled the globe a bit, so I can't say that roots music, to me, is just one form of music, from one source. My own influences come from everywhere the pop music of my childhood, the Bob Wills music my grandfather listened to, psychedelic music from the 1960s such as the Doors.

"And my interest in the archaeology of music continues. I'm only now beginning to collect the records of Charlie Parker, Theolonious Monk. Though, how all those influences come across in the music Is probably more up to people like you to notice, and tell me! Hopefully, however, the process is unconscious. Great music has to stem from some sort of unconscious void. It can't be just a cerebral exercise."

Indeed Philips has always claimed that his songs are "profoundly intuitive" his personal attempt to "yield to some kind of inner voice, or higher voice", which is an aspiration that also was of primary importance to post modernist jazz musicians such as Parker, Monk and maybe even more so, Miles Davis.

"Miles just tapped into something that has existed forever. It's the reason for music, though I'm not saying it's God because it could be Goddess," Phillips elaborates. "It's been called the music of the spheres and Van Morrison talks about a certain race memory, as though there were Celtic influences in everything, which is something far deeper than his ears can fathom. And music, at its best, really is a divine, spiritual thing that anybody, no matter what race, can tap into, if they are willing to, as I say, yield to the voices. That's always been the case, since time began."

SO what kind of voices are coming through in Better For Us, which contains one 45 second long, perfectly described "breathless" harmony? "This ties in with what we've just been talking about," claims Philips. "In that song I was using the metaphor of uprooting an oak tree, that had been there forever, because I wanted to highlight the idea that endings are as essential as beginnings.

"I also was trying to cope with growing into adulthood because our society does very little to initiate any of us into that phase of our lives."

If the latter is true, couldn't one suggest that pop music plays a pivotal part in this process of denial, dealing mostly, as it does, with adolescent dreams and desires.

Indeed, hasn't it been argued that rock culture capitalises on keeping its consumers psychologically, philosophically and politically immature, so they will continue to buy, basically, candy floss?

"Yeah, but it's difficult for me to go along with that, because there is something truly transcendent about even the early stuff like Little Richard," Phillips responds. "Though, maybe beyond 1958, rock 'n' roll did begin to mutate into something else, that was more influenced by market forces. Yet, even if the vision was diffused, as it was passed down, some stayed true to the lineage, like Hendrix extending to Eddie Cochran and Leadbelly.

But only a few have that spark of greatness. And, as I said at the beginning, it's easier to identify looking back. Like, I can tell, already, that REM have elevated pop music to something that's art. But not many contemporary musicians I could call to mind can match that level of greatness. Maybe U2."

And, from another era, Woody Guthrie, whose smiling Leftist spirit hovers over a Grant Lee Buffalo song such as Crackdown, which is dipped in venom, directed at America's militia.

"Something like that is exactly what I'm talking about, when I say our music is less like a Sermon on the Mount than a vent," Phillips concludes. "And the rage in that song is in me, and in the band. Like other feelings, a lot of this remains unspoken in our everyday lives, but comes out in the songs as in the frustration of being a citizen in a country called America.

"But although I've read quite a bit about Woody Guthrie and he was actually from the town my mom is from, I wouldn't go so far as to compare my work to Guthrie's. We are part of that lineage but, again, on an unconscious level.

"Yet, when I speak of things that are political, such as the behaviour of the American militia, it really is because I'm personally frustrated, frightened or threatened by those things. That's why so many of these songs on Copperopolis are highly personal, to me. Yet the best thing is that there's something really magic that occurs when we in the band, and as part of an audience can somehow unite through music, or art, and throw off some of our shared demons.

Obviously, if Grant Lee Buffalo can serve this purpose, they already are on that train to the next century. All aboard.

Grant Lee Buffalo play the Olympia Theatre, Dublin on Jun 17th and the GPO, Galway on July 18th.