Interview: All In With U-Melt’s Zac Lasher

HT: I know you guys also did Warren Haynes’ Christmas Jam in Asheville and you’re headed back to Mountain Jam this year, too.

ZL: Yeah, I’d never been down to Asheville for it before. They did it for two nights this year and had all this stuff going on in Asheville during the day. We got to play with the Lee Boys and Derek Trucks Band and it was a sweet afternoon. Plus it’s a good cause and there’s legends standing on like either side of you: the Allman Brothers and John Paul Jones and all that. Amazing. And Mountain Jam should be a good time—it’s a fun festival with a really good lineup they’ve put together. I mean Warren’s so good at doing stuff like that. I was lucky enough to be at The Deepest End show in New Orleans [in 2003] and it was like a six hour show with 24 different guest players.

[Photo by Jeremy Gordon]

HT: Speaking of festivals, where do you stand on the supposed festival glut? U-Melt’s played so many of all sizes by now, and I know you like ’em as both a fan and a musician.

ZL: I definitely don’t think there are too many. The emergence of a strong festival circuit has been great for bands and fans alike, and it’s really spectacular if you can pay $150 and see 80 bands over three days. With concert tickets the way they are, you have the big summer shed shows like the Dead and Phish but if you pay just a little more you can get to see a lot of bands play their sets of music. It’s hard to judge in this economy. I don’t know how some of these festivals make money, and then with some festivals it’s really obvious how they make their money. Bonnaroo can go pretty insane and spend a lot on a Metallica, but they make it all back. I’m a big fan of festivals, though, overall. It’s definitely my favorite part of what we do.

HT: Do you have a particular favorite? From player perspective and from fan, and are they the same?

ZL: Summercamp is way up there among my my favorites to play. As a band member it’s really kind of set up well so that you can mingle with other bands and meet other musicians. There’s the late night barn, for example, and there’s a backstage area that is just a big gathering of musicians hanging out. Last year I got to meet a lot of people I didn’t get to meet before. It’s definitely started to get a family reunion vibe to it.

From a fan perspective, 10,000 Lakes is great. We had some fans out there but not anyone we actually knew personally, so I got to take some time and wander around the festival grounds by myself and have that anonymity. And then for small festivals, the Wormtown guys are great. You have two stages right next to each other and then you have these late night cabins where from the moment the music ends on the mainstage there’s music going on there. If you want to stay up all night with music, you can.

HT: It’s interesting you mentioned that family reunion vibe. Obviously there’s a lot of cross-pollination in the jamband scene and bands are friends with each other. But I think people sometimes forget that you guys aren’t exactly all hanging out all the time, either—how can you, being on the road so much?

ZL: Our paths rarely cross as it is, and honestly, you try to route your shows so your paths don’t cross, because then there’s competition. We try to put together shows with bands we want to play with but it’s really difficult to do that. It’s almost an automatic yes from a music perspective but from a business perspective it’s much harder. The festival scene gets a whole bunch of bands in the same place at the same time. If you stick around for a few days, you definitely get some good time in.

[Photo by Jeremy Gordon]

HT: You guys have come a long way—how do you think the way U-Melt does its thing has evolved in the last few years?

ZL: The more you do anything, the better you’re going to get at it. As a group we’ve come a long way in terms of how we communicate onstage, how tight we are and how much we’re responding to what we’re hearing. That’s definitely a big part of it, and as you start to outgrow the rooms you’ve played before and have more doors open to you, your confidence builds. We’re at an interesting point as a band right now. We’ve been doing it for more than five years and we’re in the process of making our third album so we feel like this is a very pivotal point for us. It’s the point where things can go to the next level, and we’re feeling pretty good about all of it.

HT: Will your new album be material you’ve road tested or are you starting from scratch?

ZL: It’s stuff we’ve been playing, and we started writing the material a while ago. It’s funny, some of the songs that are on it we actually debuted at the CD release party for The I’s Mind. It’s a large album and is most likely going to be two CDs worth of music and we’re going with the assumption that we’re going to be releasing two CDs worth of music. Rob and I discovered that we were starting to write about the same things so we decided to really go down that aisle this time, whereas before, we hadn’t much.

HT: Can you give me a sense of the flavor of these collaborations?

ZL: It’s very progressive music with lots of really complicated composition and intense arrangements. We’re working really hard to get it to sound the way we want it to sound and I’m pretty excited with how it’s starting to come out right now. I feel like we’re making a soundtrack to a movie that doesn’t exist, and it’s probably going to end up being a mostly continuous set of sounds that won’t stop until the disc ends. Real different stuff.

HT: And who’d direct that movie, if it did exist?

ZL: [Laughs] Probably Terry Gilliam.

HT: Awesome. What’s your timeframe for its release?

ZL: We’re aiming to have it out in the fall and we want it to be done by the end of the winter. It’s all stuff that’s been road tested but a lot of it, well, we’re able to realize the songs in a way we can’t do live using the magic of overdubs and other stuff. It’s a lot bigger sound.

HT: Last, given that you’re all such big baseball guys, I’d be remiss if i didn’t ask you about your thought on the Mets’ chances this year.

ZL: Well, we’ve fixed the bullpen. Omar Minaya did a great job fixing it and I’m excited about K-Rod and Putz. That was definitely the biggest problem last year. I’m not to thrilled that Lowe went to Atlanta and I could do without Perez, honestly, but they’re in a do-everything-we-can mode. We’ll see. Are you a Yankees guy?

HT: Whoa-no. Red Sox to the core. I’m from Boston.

ZL: There you go. You guys look OK.

HT: Yeah, yeah, little tweaks, nothing too dramatic. Mets/Sox World Series?

ZL: Just as long as it’s not the Phillies again. I hate them so much.

• Previously on HT: Rob From U-Melt Remembers Shea