Hello there!

Happy Friday. I hope the Ticketmaster Gods were kind to you over the last few days, if you tried grabbing Winter 2026 tickets.

A few timely updates from zineland:

• Issue 7 will ship next week!!

  • I’m sorry that this was a slow announcement-to-ship timeline, in part because we deleted some content and added the East Nash Grass interview at the last minute, and also because work got the best of me these last few months.

  • Speaking of work, I’ve made the decision to walk back a few freelance clients to (1) take a deep breath from a gnarly period of starting a consulting business and working seven days a week and (2) dedicate some actual working hours to Train Songz, so we’ll cut back on the delays in the future and see what else happens with some more free time for this. I’ll still be plenty busy with real work, but it’s a risk I’m willing to take for a bit. Let’s see what happens.

  • I’m very excited for you all to get your hands on it, as it’s definitely the most robust issue yet.

  • You’ll also be getting 3 stickers, not 2, as a “heady apology” for the delay and gratitude for your patience.

• The subscription — which wasn’t taking new orders when we launched 7 whoops lol — is fixed, should you like to subscribe.

  • If you wanted to subscribe but ended up just buying a solo copy, get in touch and I’ll refund your solo copy. You’ll get issues 5, 6, and 7 immediately with your subscription. And then 8 as soon as it comes out.

  • Or just a solo copy — tell a friend :)

• Based on the amount we’ve sold, we still have free issues to give under our “1 free for every 10 sold” policy. Apply for a free issue here — honor system that you actually need it. We only have a few more to give.

  • Feel free to send that link to a friend, as well.

Other than that, a few housekeeping items…

1. If you want more content from Train Songz, sign up for Smokestack, which is a (mostly) weekly blog post sent to your email inbox where we share writing and music recs in a more informal way than the stuff we choose to print in the zine

2. We are exploring concerts. We have confirmed plans and bands in New York, Austin, and Asheville. Stay tuned for details on this very email list. Things are still in the exploratory phase for Nashville. We hope IRL events will be a chance for our community and the zine-team to come and chat about life, liberty, and the music we all love.

3. I’ve finally gotten around to making a Facebook and Twitter for Train Songz. We’ve been on TikTok, though I’m not much of a TikTok user myself so I often forget to post our videos there. I won’t be making specific content for these places, they will just be places to house best-of Instagram content and see if we can get in front of new audiences and find a few new zine subscribers…our goal with social media is ultimately to take people offline :) That reminds me I could also be posting to Reddit.

4. But my ultimate project — and this will happen in the coming months as I give things a bit more time — is to create a public webpage where you can view all Train Songz posts away from social media, so you can share it with folks who are Logged Off or check in on Train Songz without having to deal with the algorithm. I believe that small, trusted, private communities are the future of the social internet…and I would like to steer Train Songz in that direction as part of the entire package of a zine subscription.

5. Merchandise will be available exclusively to zine 7 purchasers and subscribers in a bit.

–The Conductor