FEATURED IN THIS ISSUE

1. THE PONY INTERVIEW WITH ZAC LASHER OF U-MELT
2. CALENDAR OF EVENTS

This Week at The Stone Pony: JESSE MALIN (Wednesday), STATUS GREEN (Friday),
U-MELT (Saturday)

New On The Stone Pony Calendar: NICOLE ATKINS (Dec. 1),
TODD RUNDGREN (Dec. 13), THE DILLINGER ESCAPE PLAN (Dec. 14), deSoL (Dec. 21),
BOUNCING SOULS (Three Nights! Dec. 27, 28, 29)

Buy tickets online with Stone Pony Fan Club Ticketing!

Visit The Stone Pony on MySpace at: www.myspace.com/ponyrock

BELIEVE IT, U-MELT RETURNS TO HEAT UP THE PONY STAGE

The jam band scene has become one of the cornerstones of modern American music. With a genre marked by virtuoso musicianship and all sorts of eclectic fusions of different styles and sounds, it's becoming more difficult to stand out and draw your own audience in a world of large festivals. Tracing its roots back to 2003, New York City's U-Melt quickly established themselves along the East Cost and began writing music together shortly after members Adam Bendy (electric bass), George Miller (drums and vocals), Rob Salzer (electric guitar and vocals) and Zac Lasher (keyboards and vocals) began performing together.  Shortly thereafter, they released their first album, "The Unbelievable Meltdown," (get it?) and established themselves as the late-night kings of improvisation, entertaining fans until shortly before dawn.

Their latest CD, "The I's Mind," has pushed them further into critical and commercial success, while building on their strong artistic and creative reputations. Reaching the top of all sorts of charts and garnering significant radio airplay, the album gave U-Melt a new crop of songs to perform behind, which they did in a big way throughout 2007. Now returning to the Pony stage on Saturday, November 24, the band is set to heat it up again at the club they call one of their favorite spots.  The Newsletter caught up with Zac Lasher to ask about their history with the club and lots of other things going on with the band, the jam band scene and music in general.

The Stone Pony: On your website, you call the Pony "one of our favorite spots," and we're always happy when you return.  What is it that makes the club a favorite of yours?  Can you remember the first time you performed here and are there any shows that stick out in your mind as especially memorable?

Zac Lasher: Well, I'm a Jersey boy, and a huge Springsteen fan, so the Stone Pony has always had this legendary, iconic status in my mind.  The fact that I have the opportunity to play music there a couple times a year is still something that kinda boggles my mind.  We all have a little mental list of places we aspire to play, and the Pony was always on mine.

I'll never forget the first time we played the Pony. We were opening for Perpetual Groove on August 28th, 2005, which happened to be the two-year anniversary of the first show we played together as a band. We started the show with "Green Amber," and as we were playing the intro I started looking around and realized that there was absolutely no place in the world I'd rather be.  A huge smile came to my face because I had this amazing moment of clarity, knowing that I was doing exactly what I should be doing. I felt very blessed in that moment. The staff also treats us very well, so we're always very relaxed, and we always seem to play particularly well there.

The Stone Pony: You're going to be performing two sets at your show here on the 24th. When you're doing an extended show like this, do you prepare any differently and does it give you more freedom knowing that you have all of the extra time?  Do you ever finish the first set and then try to make up anything you missed or weren't quite happy with during the second one?

ZL: The majority of the shows we play are two-set affairs, so it's not all that unusual. We love to play, so the more time we have to play, the happier we are. It does allow us a lot more freedom to stretch out and let the music flow where it decides it needs to go, as opposed to the shorter shows when we kind of need to keep a lid on things.  Also, since our songs tend to be on the long side, it allows us to play more of them, which I think makes everyone happy.

The Stone Pony: Last year, you released your second studio album, "The I's Mind". How was the experience of entering the studio with road-tested songs different from your first time out, when you were still a pretty new band?  Looking back a year later, do you consider that album a success, and what criteria do you use to judge it by?

ZL: It was a really great experience recording that album.  We went to the same studio where we recorded the first album and worked with the same engineer. The big difference was that Josh Parrish, our live sound engineer, was there co-producing with us; that and we all had some more experience under our belt.  We were a lot more comfortable with the material which allowed us to play a little more, and we had more time which always helps.

I actually just listened to "The I's Mind" a couple weeks ago as we're currently preparing to record a lot more music, so I wanted to go back and hear what we did wrong and what we did right.  I was definitely happy with what I heard.  There are some moments on that album that I absolutely love.  I'd definitely consider it a success. It's a good work of art, and that's really the only criterion I'm concerned with.  The fact that people continue to buy it doesn't suck either.

The Stone Pony: There are often questions when a jam band hits the studio that they won't be able to capture their live show.  As your improvisations and on-stage grooves are so essential to your music, how do you attempt to capture that during the recording process?  Do you keep playing and playing while the tape rolls and just use the best material, or is there a planned process that manages to achieve the vibe that you're looking for?

ZL: Well, I think we did a pretty good job of capturing our live sound on "The I's Mind," but that's more due to the fact that we co-produced it with our live engineer. He is really the person that makes U-Melt sound like U-Melt. So having him in the studio will allow us to make the instruments sound like they sound when you see us live.

Our improvisation in the studio is a different sort of thing.  By the time we start tracking, we have the structure of the songs very carefully planned out.  We use the opportunity to overdub as a chance to work out new parts and add to the arrangements.  On "Different Things," when we did the basic tracking, I only played the organ, and I went back and overdubbed the piano part. I played through the whole song with both hands on the piano which I don't usually get to do live because I'm split between the piano and the organ, so I just improvised a part all the way through, a lot of which made it to the final mix.  There's a part in the final chorus that I absolutely love that I'll never be able to play live because I have to play big chords on the organ at that point.

The Stone Pony: Is there an advantage to recording in the studio, as opposed to just releasing your best live shows? Is there still a role to play for a professional studio release in your band's development, or could you see yourselves going the way of some acts and releasing all of the shows as CDs or MP3s and letting fans get hold of the music in that way?

ZL: Well, they're very different animals.  An album stands by itself as a work of art, while a live show is an event, a performance that happens then and only then. You can release the recording of the live show, but that is more of a document of the event rather than the actual art; no matter how good the recording is, it doesn't put you in the room, and that's what the live show is all about -- the energy in the room. Listening to a recording of a live show is like looking at a photograph of a painting, you can get an idea of what it's like, and it can be beautiful, but you can't really get the feel of the piece unless you are there looking at the actual paint on the actual canvas, where you can get up close and see the brush strokes, where the colors are exactly as the painter intended them to be.  An album, on the other hand, exists on its own. While the record industry is currently in this weird state of flux due to digital downloads and how easy it is for people to pirate digital music, it's still important to us as artists to make great albums.

The Stone Pony: What about the debate of jam bands writing traditional four-minute songs versus concentrating on the musicality of an extended jam? When you're writing new material, do you ever feel pressure to produce a radio-friendly pop song with a hook that you can later extend, or do you feel that songwriting for the jam band stage is a different art altogether?

ZL: It's funny you ask that; this is something that Rob and I have been discussing quite a lot lately. I don't know if it's necessarily a different art. I think that even our 18-minute-long songs have hooks. I assume that's why people like them. But they're definitely designed for live performance. They're constructed to have an ebb and flow of energy and to build to a climax, whereas a four-minute pop song doesn't always do that. Right now we're experimenting with taking that aesthetic, along with our love of mixing different styles, and condensing it into a more manageable package.  We've been listening to a lot of Frank Zappa lately, and I'm amazed at how he's able to throw so many different musical ideas into one song and still maintain good continuity while keeping it under seven minutes.

The Stone Pony: You have a pretty liberal taping policy, allowing fans to record shows as long as the venues permits and the show isn't being scheduled for commercial release. How do you think the rise of digital music has changed the dynamic of "tape trading," from the days when the bands you admire were starting out?  Do you think that the fans make a big difference in promoting the band and bands need to continue to find better ways to promote themselves directly to their audience as opposed to getting signed by labels or distributors to get their music out there?

ZL: It's just so much easier to get the music out there now. Anyone with a computer and an Internet anywhere in the world can go to the Live Music Archive and there's tons of shows by tons of bands to choose from and listen to for free. It's really pretty amazing. It's very different from how it used to be. With things like Myspace, Pandora, and other social- and music-based websites, it's become a lot easier for independent bands to get their name out there, which is really a beautiful thing, I think.

The Stone Pony: Talk about life on the road a little bit. How do you usually travel from gig to gig and what are some of your favorite ways to pass the time while traveling? Do you get a lot of time to explore new cities that you visit and is there anything you especially like or dislike about touring?

ZL: We travel around in a van with a trailer attached that has all our gear. We usually pass the time by reading [or] playing games on our phones. We have a collective sense of humor that is extraordinarily raunchy, so we constantly try to entertain ourselves by pushing the limits of decency. Sometimes we'll listen to the show from the night before, sometimes we'll sleep. I like to use the time to check out and meditate for a while. Sometimes we even get work done. We don't often get to explore the places we play as we'll usually show up and go right to the venue, load in, sound check, eat dinner, play the show, load out, sleep, wake up and drive to another town.

All in all, I really love being on the road. The best part is definitely playing music every night. You really just can't beat that.

The Stone Pony: I know I've been calling you a jam band in this interview, but that's an oversimplification of your sound, which touches on rock, funk, electronica, jazz, progressive and trance at different times. Is there a new sound that you're hearing, either on the jam band scene or elsewhere, that is striking you as something new and exciting and feel will become a part of your sound in the future?

ZL: There are always new sounds to be heard. One of the things I love about being in this band is that we have no set limits on what we can sound like, so new elements enter our music all the time. Right now we're learning some new songs that contain feels or styles that we haven't worked with before; one song has a kind of two-step feel to it, and another has a deep dub groove, but they still very much remain U-Melt music.

The Stone Pony: What are U-Melt's plans for 2008? Do you anticipate returning to the studio for a follow-up to "The I's Mind"?  Are there any other projects that you'd like fans to keep on the lookout for?

ZL: We've been spending the last five months building a recording studio in Brooklyn, NY, and we're finally just about finished. In December we're gonna start laying down tracks for what will end up being a two-disc concept album -- and then some. We hope to get the first part out early next year. In the meantime, we're going to keep doing what we've been doing: working on new music and playing lots of shows in lots of different places around the country. We're going to go to Colorado for the first time in the winter, and hopefully we'll be able to make it to the West Coast next summer.

The official U-Melt website can be found at www.umelt.com. Their latest CD, "The I's Mind," can be purchased online or at fine music retailers like Jack's Music in Red Bank, NJ.

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