The biggest landmark in Jason Lytle's home town of Modesto, Calif., is a 75-foot steel arch that spells out the ambitions of the community, circa 1912. Water Wealth Contentment Health, it reads, in contrast to the present reality of the neighbourhood, which is rife with poverty and drug abuse.

For Lytle, the Modesto Arch and its environs symbolize what happens when the American dream gets infected with indifference. It's a failing he takes personally, and it resounds through the songs he writes for Grandaddy, the Modesto quintet that has become of one of the most applauded bands on the alternative pop scene.

"I see that stuff everywhere, things getting dirtier and more and more tainted, and more broken, and people caring less," Lytle said in a soft monotone, his eyes hidden behind big shades. "And that keeps me looking more and more for places that are nice and clean and orderly."

Sometimes, he just gets on his bike and starts hunting, even on the road, even in towns like Cleveland, where he split from the tour bus recently and biked for 10 miles, determined to find some place of contentment and health within the unrelieved urban blight. He didn't find it.

Just as often, he does what most people do when they confront a big bad situation they can't handle. He withdraws into a space where he can control everything: the home studio in the Modesto house he bought from the proceeds of Grandaddy's break-out 2001 album, The Sophtware Slump.

"It's all about creating my own little perfect worlds out of this imperfect world," he said. There's no shortage of material -- it's right there on the other side of his picture window, in the messed-up Eden that he sees with the disappointed eye of someone who wants its false promises to be true.

You can hear it in El Caminos in the West, a song from Grandaddy's new album Sumday, which comes out on V2 Records today. The sound of the music is full of sunshine and pleasure, while Lytle riffs in his wide-eyed gentle tenor on the symbols of his town, which was created by the Central Pacific Railroad in 1870. "Paint the words, a simple wish for peace of mind and happiness," he sings. "Here comes the chaos, perfectly on time again.. . ."

Alienation is nothing new in popular music. Lytle's special genius is to project the ache of disaffection while giving you, in his sweet layered sounds, an objective correlative for the very thing he's missing. "I wish I didn't feel that way so much," he murmured. He has certainly done everything he could to avoid those feelings, and to be in environments where fresh air and physical vitality trumped every vacuum-packed pleasure the air-conditioned nightmare had to offer. Before starting Grandaddy a decade ago with two friends, Lytle spent his life on his bike, and especially on his skateboard. He was a star on the half-pipe circuit, till an injury finished his boarding career overnight.

"It had completely taken over my life," he said. After it was over, "I had this huge void in my life, all this intensity and creativity and adrenalin that weren't doing anything. I was a prime candidate for self-destruction. It was really lucky for me that I had something to fall back on."

He had gotten into music the way a lot of skateboarders do, via the homemade punk that washes through the scene like Gatorade. Unlike some of his buddies, who bashed at drum kits with more fury than talent, he found he had a knack for it, and beavered at it in the same all-out way he used to skate, till he found ways to master his new gear: keyboards, song structures, lyrics, microphones.

Listening to the relaxed, de luxe environments he and his four mates have created on the new disc, you couldn't know the ferocity of effort that went into them. Lytle decided to make the record one track at a time and to grind away without flinching for as long as it took to get each one just right.

"It wrings me dry," he said. "I kind of live and breathe within the song. It infiltrates my dreams. I'll go on bike rides, carrying it around with me everywhere. Sometimes it got really frustrating. I would come to a standstill for one reason or another, and for a day or three weeks absolutely nothing would happen. That's my least favourite part, because I have this overriding guilt, that I should be working always."

Lytle grew up in a working-class family that didn't work well at all. His father, a grocery clerk, split from his mother when Lytle was 5. His several siblings are "freaks. There's something wrong mentally with every single one of them. My mom says I'm the only one who can have a rational conversation with her. I'm the only one who turned out good. . . .

"My dad thought everything I did was a joke. But he's in back-patting mode right now. He and my stepmother have made up all these stories about how supportive they were, like some kind of selective memory. . . . My mom's a hermit. She lives in the desert in Arizona, with a couple of dogs and a couple acres of land. She's to blame for a lot of my quality traits, especially my antisocial traits. When I was a little kid, she used to wear this T-shirt with iron-on letters, LMTFA. Leave Me The Fuck Alone."

He was almost chuckling while he talked about it, as if the whole familiar mess were too painful to approach except as someone else's comedy. It's another exit strategy, like the perfect worlds he creates in his studio, or the robot characters he invents to take the fall when he drinks too much or goes wild the way that skateboarders do.

The best exit, however, is the one that needs no language. His favourite word for a long time was "ineffable," and you can hear his ambition to reach that condition even in wordy new songs such as The Group Who Couldn't Say, a fable about some overachieving corporate types who step out of their sealed buildings one day and are struck dumb by the beauty of a natural world they had never noticed before.

"When I rebel against the whole talking thing, it's only because I find that the most important things in my life don't require talking, and the things that I've been most affected by have nothing to do with words," he said. "Listening to Beethoven, or riding my skateboard or my bike, or playing the piano, or sitting outside listening to the wind. That's probably my all-time favourite sound, the wind moving through the trees."

His real-life perfect world is like most other people's: an unspoilt outdoor paradise where the mountains extend across the horizon, and green is everywhere, and you can walk or ride without some commercial assault on the senses -- the kind of scene pictured in some of the background videos Grandaddy plays during its concerts. It's an Eden where other people and even oneself are only figures in a landscape, which may explain Lytle's modest way of talking about the beauties he creates. In this, as in so many other ways, he's a true son of Modesto.

Grandaddy plays the Opera House in Toronto on Aug. 6.