Hey,

Thank you so much for purchasing a copy of Train Songz #6! Your support means the world and makes this whole project possible.

• Before we get into it, I want to let you know that your zine will most likely ship on Friday. I will send an email when it does!

• Annual subscribers are automatically subscribed to our Monday morning email, Smokestack, but you’re also welcome to sign up if you want more Train Songz content!

I’m “The Conductor.” At least that’s my zine name. My actual name is—don’t worry about it, it’s much more boring and less train-related. Like you, I’m a fan that fell in love with Billy’s music. I’m especially drawn to the bluegrass, folk, old-time, and Americana musical tradition that he honors at each show. Bringing us all closer to that aspect of the music is at the heart of the zine.

I started train_songz the meme page in July 2023 and Train Songz the zine in January 2024. Both of these things would not have happened without a fella zine-named Promontory Paul, an old friend of mine with an equally boring and not-train-related human name. He’s the person who first started sending me YouTube links of Billy Strings. That escalated quickly…

We ran the zine out of my studio apartment like a print-media-frenzied Bert & Ernie for issues one and two, and we did literally everything: designing, writing, printing, folding, stuffing, stamping, addressing, posting, and several other -ing words (aka “gerunds” if yr freaky) that took over the first half of my 2024.

Starting with the third issue, the zine and our operation started to grow beyond two people and few enough pages to read in a quick sitting. Thanks to more subscribers and more money rolling in to support the cause, we were able to pay others in the community to start helping us out with everything from art and design to copyediting to merchandise printing and fulfillment.

Our team today consists of a rotating cast of 20+ paid contributors, all sourced from within our bluegrass-loving community. As our team has grown, our zine has also more than 5x’d in size from 8 to 44 pages over the course of our fourth, fifth, and sixth issues. (It literally cannot get any bigger, as of now, per USPS thickness regulations, which is not something I ever planned on impacting my life in a serious way.)

Thanks to your support as a subscriber, I’m more confident than ever before in our ability to continue investing into this project. I love everything about it so much, and I hope you feel that with every new issue.

Thank you, again, for your contribution towards the zine! We reinvest everything we can back into it, and I believe doing that in favor of short-term gains is better for whatever this thing is meant to be in the long-term.

Long live print media, and long live bluegrass music.

If you’d like to hear our story and why we do what we do in more detail, check us out on the What’s The Reason For This Again? podcast.

Where else to find our content

Our zines are the most important piece of content we put out, and we are zealots for the importance of print media in the age of digital content and algorithms. You can’t put emails or social media posts in a shoebox and smile at the memory in 30 years. (I mean, I guess you could if you printed them out, but why are you doing that?)

However, our quarterly zines as we make them today are a lot of work. As soon as we finish the last, we’re basically working on the next. This isn’t anyone’s day job, after all, so we’re probably maxed out at four per year.

So other than subscribing to the zine and finding that in your physical mailbox four times per year, here’s where else you can find our content on a more consistent basis:

• Sign up for Smokestack, our Monday morning blog post

• Follow us on Instagram, our Niche Meme Death Star

• Join us on YouTube for curated playlists like:

  • Tiny Train Concerts

  • Zine listening companions

• Tune in on SoundCloud for Train Songz Presents… shows, where the only rule is to open and close your set with a train song. We’ve worked with Water Tower, High Country Hustle, North Fork Crossing, and Buffalo Galaxy.

Help us grow the zine

This is a niche, independent project…it’s not for everyone, but if you know someone who would love the zine, “word of mouth” (aka you telling a friend) is our best way to spread the word and grow. If you have a friend who might enjoy the zine, please consider telling them about it!

Heck, we even offer free subscriptions if money is tight. (We give out one for every 10 sold. We have 875 annual subscribers and 115 total free applications, so our waiting list it 115-87=28. Math!)

Questions, comments, concerns, ideas? I want to hear them all. I read every email I get, though I can’t say the same about Instagram DMs. Please respond directly here or send me a note at conductor@trainsongz.net, and I’ll get back to you.

–The Conductor