Hey,

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

• Before we get into it, please respond to this email with your Instagram username so I can add you to Close Friends, where I occasionally post subscriber-only updates.

Call me The Conductor. 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. 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 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, sixth, and seventh 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 on-again-off-again blog

• 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

As a subscriber to the zine, you have access to our referral program. You have a unique link, and if someone subscribes to Train Songz through that link, you get points towards money I’ll directly pay you to reimburse concert tickets: $25, $50, etc. depending on how many folks you refer. You’re helping me by spreading the word about the zine, and I want to help you in return.

You can access your unique link by logging into your account at zine.trainsongz.net. Within your subscriber portal, you’ll see a “referrals” tab. There’s your link!

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