Hello!

In case you missed it, we announced our last issue of the year on Friday. All but three pages are dedicated to an interview with Royal Masat about his time on tour with Bryan Sutton and Billy Strings. Its pages are about 75% words and 25% art by our 18 different artists who contributed to this issue by illustrating Royal’s words and stories. The result is something quite different than your typical shiny magazine interview, and we’re stoked about it.

We are going to hand off this issue to ship in the second half of this week, so I expect zines to start hitting mailboxes over the last two weeks of December — as long as you’re an existing subscriber or grab a zine in the next few days.

After that, we’ll slow down for the holidays and zines ordered after the 23rd will likely be delivered in the new year.

You can order a zine by subscribing, purchasing a solo issue, or applying for a free issue. (We give out one free issue for every 10 sold, no questions asked — honor system.)

Subscribers, you can also nominate a friend to get a copy of issue #8 for free as a thank you for your support this year! Each issue costs around $11,000 to produce at the scale of 2,000 zines after paying for printing, contributors, stickers, and postage. Physical media is expensive, and we’ve paid artists and contributors over $20K this year. We couldn’t do it without the financial support of our 1,213 subscribers.

We’re coming off a lovely weekend in Austin, where we hosted a show with Valley Flower at Sam’s Town Point in South Austin. Impeccable vibe. While we can’t realistically travel all the time, I’m excited about picking a few key weekends per year and channeling Train Songz into live events with bands we love.

The next iteration of our events experimentation is with the Asheville Mountain Boys at the Gray Eagle on Thursday, February 12, at 8 PM. This is the off day between four days of Billy Strings in Asheville. Tickets are $25 after fees. We’re paying the band their flat rate and also splitting ticket sales with the band and venue. Will we — the middle man — lose money? Probably. But there’s only way to find out!

This will be a release party for issue #9, our first of 2026. Which the zine-team started planning in an Airbnb late on Friday.

See you there, Asheville.

–The Conductor