Hey,

Thank you so much for signing up for Train Songz! Your support means the world and makes this whole project possible.

Two quick things before we get into it:

First, please respond to this email with your Instagram username so I can add you to Close Friends, where I occasionally post subscriber-only updates. (Replying also tells the email robots that I'm a real person and not a spam goblin, which helps my future emails actually reach you!)

Second, add conductor@trainsongz.net to your contacts. If you're on Gmail, drag this email to your Primary tab. (We didn't go to war with the algorithms just to lose to a spam filter.)

Call me The Conductor. I started train_songz the meme page in July 2023 and Train Songz the zine in January 2024 to take things offline. This post does a decent job rounding up our story from the beginning.

Both of these things would not have happened without a fella zine-named Promontory Paul, an old friend of mine who likes really olde stuff. Our goal with the zine is to anchor the current state of The Sound with the history to which it’s connected. Promontory Paul leads the way with his “Olde Tune Revue” column.

With the first two issues, we ran the zine out of my studio apartment like a print-media-frenzied Bert & Ernie, we did everything: designing, writing, printing, folding, stuffing, stamping, addressing, posting, and several other -ing words (aka "gerunds" if yr freaky) that took over all of my non-working hours. (And some of my working hours, if we’re being honest.)

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 15+ paid contributors each issue, all sourced from within our wooden-instrument-loving community. As our team has grown, our zine has also grown from 8 to 44 pages.

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 acoustic music.

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 social media platforms and algorithms monetizing the last frontier: our attention.

I also love print because 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. If you’re doing that, good for you, I guess.)

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:

• You’ll get Smokestack, our weekly-ish blog

• Follow us on Instagram, our Niche Meme Death Star

• Join us on YouTube for curated playlists like Tiny Train Concerts and 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.

What to expect from this email list

I won't clog your inbox. You'll hear from me when there's something worth saying—new issue announcements, behind-the-scenes updates, maybe a playlist drop. Think monthly-ish, not daily.

Help us grow the zine

As a subscriber, you have the opportunity to gift a friend a free issue with each issue we release. I’ll email out a form with the release of each new quarterly issue.

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

Quick Links

• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/train_songz/

• Smokestack: https://smokestack.trainsongz.net/

• YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@trainsongz/featured

• SoundCloud: https://www.youtube.com/@trainsongz/featured