Hello there!!

I missed the Blood Moon on Friday night because I was at Mountain Grass Unit’s album release show at Brooklyn Bowl, which is actually in Nashville. Though there’s also one in Brooklyn, which is just called Brooklyn Bowl. Personally, I would’ve gone with Nashville Bowl Brooklyn. Keep ’em on their toes.

Anyway, a few of us made the trip out to Nashville, and for our troubles MGU stuck us on a table in a narrow hallway that functioned as the primary thoroughfare between the front door and the GA floor.

Between this prime real estate and our zealous proselytizing about the virtues of analog media, we were damn near unavoidable, and we handed out all 500 copies we’d mailed to Nashville straight off the printing press in Richmond.

Train Songz would be nothing without UPS two-day shipping.

→ GET TRAIN SONGZ #11 • $12+ PAY WHAT YOU WANT

→ SUBSCRIBE FOR ALL 2026 ISSUES • $33 / $55 / $77 SLIDING SCALE

→ FREE ISSUE REQUEST • ONE GIVEN FOR EVERY 10 SOLD

To write their cover story, we interviewed MGU three times: May 2025, as they graduated college and prepared for a gnarly summer tour; October 2025, after they came out the other side of it; and July 2026, in the run-up to their debut studio album, Appalachian Smoke, which came out last Friday on Dualtone Records.

We’re grateful to Luke, Drury, Sam, Josiah, and the rest of our friends at the small-but-mighty Team MGU for letting us keep checking back in with them over the course of more than a year, and for trusting us to turn those conversations into the cover story of this issue.

We printed 3,000 copies of this one. We’ve earmarked 1,000 to give away, and the other 2,000 will be hand-numbered and sent to subscribers, single-issue buyers, and whoever else wants one. We’re in the process of numbering those now, and I’m going to guess they’ll be ready to mail early next week.

📖 Inside issue #11

Along with our Mountain Grass Unit cover story, Promontory Paul traces “Cold Rain and Snow” through more than a century of Appalachian history; we weigh in on four new Billy Strings songs heard live ahead of So Much for Goodbyes; Brakeman turns you on to Hard Drive’s Wasting My Whole Life Away; plus comics, original illustrations, trains, and other curiosities throughout.

🚂 Get the whole 2026 run

If you’d like to join our 1,480 subscribers in supporting niche print media and helping us pay our artists, printers, and the United States Postal Service, you can subscribe here.

A 2026 subscription gets you all four issues from this year: #9, #10, this new Mountain Grass Unit issue, and our final issue of 2026.

We’ll send #9 and #10 right away, #11 as soon as we finish numbering it, and #12 when it comes out later this year.

What’s in issues 9 and 10, Mr. Conductor? Glad you asked:

#9 — Train of Fools (Winter 2026)
Our 56-page “journey” issue: Sam Grisman Project’s road to their debut LP, Asheville Mountain Boys and Promontory Paul in Japan, Maddie Denton and Brenna MacMillan touring Ireland, and Kenny Feinstein’s path from punk rock to old-time music and Foghorn Stringband.

#10 — Jarrod Walker / Nighthawk (Spring 2026)
Our Jarrod Walker cover issue, built around an interview timed to the release of his debut record Nighthawk, with Christopher Henry on “West Dakota Rose,” another Promontory Paul & Friends cartoon, a crossword, and original illustrations throughout.

Not looking for four zines? You can also buy just #11 here.

And as always, if buying a zine isn’t in the budget right now but you’d still like to read it, you can request a free copy here. We set aside a big chunk of every print run specifically to give away.

🤳 Social media time out

We posted the new issue on Instagram. If you have a second to toss the post a like, leave a comment, add to your story, or share it with the one person you know who has a latent niche print media freak inside of them that Train Songz might awaken…anything helps us on our arbitrary quest to have as many subscribers as Nags Head, North Carolina, has residents.

→ SHARE THE ISSUE #11 LAUNCH POST

🫂 The zine team

Many hands make heady work around here, and the zine would not be the zine without our talented cast of artists under Liza’s direction.

Special thanks to Promontory Paul, Brakeman, Grant Peterson, Morganne, Logan Walker, Glow_worm, Ben Bingham, Favorite Vegetable, Will T Vennes III, Zak Fowler, Hog Head, Aidan Montes, Allisonismyhero, TOON, and Alex Culbreth for bringing their time and talents to the zeeeeeeeeeen.

Every artist who contributed to this issue was paid for their work, thanks to our paying readers and sponsors.

🙏 Presenting Sponsors

This issue was made possible by WinterWonderGrass, Beagle BBQ, Lot Dog, and Token Made.

We’d also like to thank Folk Ware, Home Run Vintage Guitars, Snappy’s Small Bar, The Black Cat, Turkey and the Wolf, Pisgah Banjo Company, IVPR, Telluride Bluegrass, Northbound Coffee Roasters, Phish Bimbos, Pick 5, Matt Combs, Grassfed Bluegrass Festival, and Mama Juice Mountain Magic.

Our sponsors are mostly small businesses run by people who read the zine, too. Please Uno-reverse their support back to them if you’re interested in what they do.

If you’d like to learn more about sponsoring a future issue, reply to this email!

💘 Thank you

Handing out 500 copies of a new issue in Nashville while another 400 were distributed at Freak Fair was a pretty gnarly reminder of how far this thing has traveled since Promontory Paul and I started making it in my apartment in January 2024.

Thank you for reading it, paying for it, showing it to your friends, sending us pictures when it arrives, and enabling our habit of making increasingly elaborate pieces of niche print media.

We appreciate the hell out of each and every one of you.

→ GET TRAIN SONGZ #11 • $12+ PAY WHAT YOU WANT

See you in your mailbox soon. Let’s get physical.

–The Conductor