Hello! I think for just about two weeks no one was able to start a new subscription. Sorry about that! We had some technical issues under the hood, as January 10 was the first time subscription payments started renewing and we had some work to do to ensure everything went smoothly. It works now.

Shoutout to our Locomotive Engineer, Jonesy, for putting in a lot of hours to straighten us out this month. Our website and subscription infrastructure would crumble without him! There literally is no “recurring payment and address management for print media” tool online, and we’re getting pretty close to building the Substack of print media. We think we might even be able to offer it to others pretty soon, too.

Anyway, this email is a gaggle of small updates…

🎟️ Train Songz Asheville

This is my biggest focus for the next three weeks! We’ll be in Asheville on Thursday, February 12, for a concert we’re hosting with the Asheville Mountain Boys. This is their album release party. We’ve already sold about 1/3 of all available tickets, so I recommend grabbing one online ahead of time, rather than buying at the box office the day of the show.

• Tickets here — $20, but actually $25 with fees.

• It’s on the Thursday between Billy’s shows on Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday.

Our role at this show: We’re hosting. We’re paying the band. We’re renting the venue. We will break even at about 2/3 of tickets sold. Wish us luck! We’d love to do this a few times a year, if all goes well. Mountain Grass, you reading this?

📬 Ready to join us this year?

Click here to sign up for our four quarterly print issues in 2026 for $33, $55, or $77. The first will be out in February, and we’ll go from there.

If it’s not a good time for you to pay, we will continue giving out one issue for every ten sold. It’s a free copy, not subscription, so you’ll need to apply each issue.

📖 The Royal Masat Interview (#8)

If you want a copy of the Royal Masat interview, you can grab it here. Since this was a 2025 issue and we're now selling 2026 subscriptions, it's not included.

📚 Back issues #1–7

If you’re interested in reprints of issues 1–7, those are available via mail-in cash order. Instructions are in last year’s issues. If you don’t have those, they’ll be in our 2026 issues, as well. But not online. We can’t put everything on the internet, can we?

🫂 Current Subscribers

If you would like to change your price for 2026 to our recommended $55 — or also $33 or $77 — you can do so here.

Check your subscription status here. A lot of folks have had recurring payments fail because of new cards and whatnot, so please make sure your billing information is updated here if you would like to renew your subscription. You can also cancel your renewal at the same link.

💨 Smokestack

If you’re interested in some other third thing between memes and print, I’m blogging on Smokestack. I’ll be putting more time into it this year, because not all writing I want to do is appropriate for the print.

📧 Merchandise & Z8 Survey

I will be emailing out a survey about the Royal Masat issue and merchandise link to subscribers and those who grabbed a solo copy later this week. My vision for Train Songz merchandise is not to become a giant clothing brand, but something that only subscribers can rock. #gatekeeping

🤹 My plan this year

I have a pretty all-consuming client until June, but after that I’m planning on booking myself only like 50% busy as Train Songz got invited to Telluride Bluegrass Festival on a press pass situation (!!!) and I think it’s time to go all in, which means leaving some actual work hours for this thing. Let’s have a year.

–The Conductor