💨 I'm a nervous wreck

That's a Fall Out Boy reference and also a timely Edmund Fitzgerald pun and also an accurate depiction of my homeostasis. Anxiety is the coal that lights my firebox. There would be no zine without the nervous primate that's hijacked the controls of my brain—crisis narrowly averted again and again.

Anyway. Smokestack. Here we are. I want to bring this back, and I want to stay consistent with it to warm myself up for 2026 where my goal will be to send once per week. I don't think I want Smokestack to be epically long, unless the situation demands it. My general guiding light will be to use this weekly dispatch to "put you on" to something enjoyable. [Art school kid voice]: We intend this space to be for curation rather than creation, if you will. Come 2026 Smokestack will be fully paywalled and only available to annual zine subscribers, as part of your paid subscription. I want you to get more bang for your buck so we're coming at you with ad hoc memes on social media, once-weekly fun and interesting links, and then our quarterly focus will always be making the best zine possible.

Based on our zine #7 survey results — btw thank you for the 300 of you that filled it out, you get a gold star and also one of you got a free Train Songz merchandise haul, if that wasn't you better luck next time and we will be continuing the quarterly surveys and we'll always have that free merch winner winner chicken dinner situation — more of you could be aware of our non-print offerings. So here they are:

• We have playlists on nugs, Spotify, and Apple Music. The nugs links are best accessed via your phone, by the way. Their link-sharing technology leaves a lot to be desired, which leads me to ask where my $150 per year is going? We gotta bring back physical tapes, man, it's incredible to have access to all this live music but it's a tragedy to rent it and not own it. Should Train Songz hire tapers? I'm rambling. I think our playlist from the recent Doc Watson biography, which has every song mentioned in that book, is my personal favorite right now: Spotify / Apple. Thank you Brakeman for making it.
• We also have playlists on YouTube that correspond to each issue of the zine, put together by our resident YouTube Freak Promontory Paul. We also have our own videos on YouTube like an iPhone tape of the Chris Thile Billy Strings Cory Henry show at Lincoln Center and Train Songz Presents... live shows with bands we dig.

Wrote more than I intended to above, so I'll keep it short down here. My recommended video of the week is Steve Martin and Alison Brown on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, which is undoubtedly one of the late-night shows of all time. Their all-star backing band includes (friend of the zine) Michael Daves, Bronwyn Keith-Hynes, and Sierra Hull. Casual!!! By the way all those links go to sick vids from each of those respective artists, so click away. Smokestack is all about clicking and getting out of it, and hopefully your day is slightly better for it. That's the goal around here. Peace!!!