For your clicking pleasure

• Tiny Train Concert: Jay Faires aka @jerrytonestore
  • Cahaba Roots coming soon... !!!
• Train Songz Presents... Water Tower & High Country Hustle
• We released a new zine... tell yr freakiest friends

Good stuff up top...keep reading if you're in the mood for words...

Comment below: What bands should we collaborate with next? We've got silly model train museum concerts... we've got live sets that begin and end with a train song...

More manifesting: We'd love to do Train Songz Presents... as a live recorded show one day. For now bands do it at their own shows and send us the audio, but it would be awesome if we put on a live event to record the set. Working on it...

We just put out our sixth issue of Train Songz. I am more proud of it than I've ever been. As Promontory Paul texted our small group chat of print media illuminati, it's a "new high score" for the zine. I agree. It passes the "eye test," which was a big priority for us going into this issue. My vanilla ass even studied punk zines to get inspired. Less only-text pages were a big priority for us going into this issue, and put more thought than ever into the interior design and layout.

I am a writer, and writing had dominated design in the zine up to this point. However, this time around, we prepped writing sooner and designed in and around the writing. We worked with more artists than ever. It shows.

Yada yada yada. Enough about that. I'll let you be the judge. Once you get it, let me know what you think. It should mail Thursday or Friday this week, so expect it the following week. Or maybe the week after that, if USPS falters at any point along your envelope's long journey home. Snail mail! Pain in the tail. I love it.

Now to this week's 'stack. My vision for this Monday morning email is not that we bury you with a ton of writing every time, but that we give you something worth opening. The value is not always to be "creation" (writing something new) but also "curation" (aggregating stuff we dig).

This is a curation week, mostly because I'm gassed from, and honestly still locked into, all things zine finalization and mailing. Think of this email as my version of the hungover substitute teacher rolling in the video cart instead of teaching you about the American Revolutionary War in seventh grade.

TINY TRAIN CONCERTS!!!

Truly a dream come true to debut this video series, first with Jay Faires and soon with Cahaba Roots.

"What if NPR's Tiny Desk Concerts, but with model trains?"

This idea is like over a year in the making. Here's something I texted Promontory Paul on November 27th, 2023. That's when the first zine, to be released about six weeks later, was just a twinkle in my third eye.

Our first episode of Tiny Train Concerts is with the eminently talented Jay Faires, who is not only a great musician but also the world's go-to resource for all things Jerry Garcia tone. (Get you a man who can do both!)

Throwback to our first collaboration, which was purely virtual, two days after I sent that above text message. I think it looks a lot better with a real train backdrop! Thank you to the Bay State Model Railroad Museum in Roslindale, Massachusetts, for having us, and look out for our next episode with Cahaba Roots coming soon...

Train Songz Presents...

For extended listening, we also have two new episodes of Train Songz Presents... where the only rule is to start and end your live set of music with a train song. If YouTube is your thing, we're also on there.

Water Tower

High Country Hustle

Hope y'all enjoy this stuff. Just gotta click around!!!

–The Conductor