💨 No work for a railroad man

Before we get into this week, some stuff to listen to:

🪻 I continue to enjoy everything the new band Valley Flower puts out. Only a few months off the release of their self-titled debut album, they just dropped a new single entitled "It Rains Everywhere I Go." Listen on Spotify / Apple / YouTube.

📼 The YouTube algorithm reminded me earlier this week about about Del McCoury Band's NPR Tiny Desk Concert and their unexpected collaboration with the Preservation Hall Jazz Band doing "I'll Fly Away" on Letterman — full American Legacies album on Spotify / Apple. Del, if you're reading this, how about a Tiny Train Concert?

I got laid off last week. Those "Greenville Trestle High" lyrics, which very well be my personal favorite train song, hit a little different after that. Though my uncalloused hands cannot steal any valor from real laborers and pretend to be a genuine Railroad Man, I have at least spent the last 18 months in a pretty deep railroad moment: I've slung newfangled media in a way that's amassed enough Instagram followers to fill Madison Square Garden, while leaving a few thousand outside with one finger in air, and I've slung oldfangled media in a way that the USPS thinks I'm a deeply addicted to collecting stamps. (I'm not kidding. They won't stop mailing me premium postage magazines where one can buy not just stamps, but stamp memorabilia. Though I must admit, the new Goodnight Moon stamps go unreasonably hard.)

I've worked consistently since graduating from college, which was...oh me, oh my...more than seven but less than nine years ago. Any age-heads out there might want to do the math and guess how old the strange man you met online who refers to himself as "The Conductor" might be.

This moment is my first unemployed one since leaving my Formal Education assuming my position in the American Machine. My previous employer was good enough to give me severance and health insurance through the end of the summer and offer to introduce me to new opportunities. For these three reasons – and more! – I'm meeting this professionally adverse moment with a lot of comfort and privilege.

Past the flesh wound blow to the ego, looking at the loss of a job as a potentially exciting thing is living life on easy mode. I'm not worried for my basic needs; I'm dealing with second-order problems. (I'd call them "champagne problems," but that wouldn't be accurate as these problems didn't originate in the Champagne region of France. These are just sparkling problems.) So I have the gift of time to reset and reflect for a second. I'm grateful for that, and I must admit those Billy June dates are calling to me like the Green Goblin mask.

With that gift of time in mind, I'm going to bet on my own horse. Instead of immediately going back to an open floor plan with 15 of my closest strangers and seeking gainful employment at a single company for the fifth time in my life, I want to mix and match a few freelance clients around social media, content strategy, and audience development.

I want to emphasize that I do not consider Train Songz an immediately monetizable horse. I'm not going to jack up the price of the zine on you because I lost my job — though this is a good moment to hint that we're experimenting with more expensive one-off issues, outside of the bounds of a regular subscription. By unlatching from subscription pricing, we'll be able to try our hand at doing funky things with print and ink and the general physicality of the media that charging $11 doesn't allow us. These zines would be more expensive because they cost more to produce, not in a reactionary-to-my-circumstances sort of way.

I will, however, proudly tell potential employers and clients about Train Songz. I didn't have this to talk about the last time I was job hunting, and it's a big part of the reason I'm feeling confident enough to risk the vicissitudes of freelance work. I was having too much fun to realize this, but it turns out that Train Songz is actually professionally impressive for someone who works around social medial, emails, and other such digital-content ephemera. People generally pay me to make content that stands out and gets attention amid a tumultuous sea of insane algorithms and clogged inboxes that comprise today's oversaturation. (God's work.) I was prepping my resume over the weekend and found out Train Songz's Instagram engagement rate (1.9%) is six times the industry average (0.3%). Not bad! Thank you for double-tapping your way to a new line on my resume...

This whole project is a reflection of tricks I've learned along the way doing social media for Brands and Business Executives. Though what I love most about Train Songz is that it's more of a reflection of what I would do if I was 100% in charge. No formal approval processes here. I am the captain now.

I think it might be especially helpful that between Train Songz and my last job, I've built up a lot of experience around non-social things, as well, like emails and magazines and subscriptions, which is helpful! One cannot be the "social media guy" forever. Or can they? Unsure. It's a pretty new profession, slowly but surely taken more seriously. The sentiment of "My kid has an Instagram, how hard can it be? Here's minimum wage," still exists, no doubt, but it's less prevalent than it was a decade ago. (Blesséd are they who fill the internet with content! Pay the posters...)

I'm bringing this public reflection here because Train Songz is an extension of self. We are not Rolling Stone. You might feel the bumps, so I'm getting ahead of them. I don't want Train Songz to go anywhere, and I don't think it will, but it may need to naturally adapt as my work circumstances change. I've only done Train Songz under one day job, the one I no longer have. That old job afforded me with a pretty excellent balance. I had an encouraging boss with reasonable expectations and a manageable workload — my first job where I didn't feel overworked and underpaid. A miracle for the social media guy! That's gone. A voice in the back of my head is absolutely saying maybe that'll never return. Train Songz could only exist in that hard-to-find environment, and you're gonna burn out with whatever's next. You found an anomaly, but it's done. Back to the grindstone, baby.

Betting on myself means not listening to that voice. It means being confident in being good at what I do and knowing I should be paid well to do it. I'm fortunate to already have a few leads on freelance clients, who I'm getting lunch with this week. When describing my professional experience to them, I won't only tell them about what I accomplished at my last day job, which are resume lines I'm very proud of, but also Train Songz! That's pretty crazy! I have loved every insane second of doing this thing, from turning a deranged Apple Note of memes into 449 posts to hours on hours spent pushing literal papers: envelopes, zines, stickers, stamps. It's very cool that hard work is accidentally paying off in a professional way. I hadn't thought much about that until an unannounced Zoom call punched me in the face and woke me up out of my little complacency bubble the other day.

I'm gonna see what kind of income I can cobble together for myself, taking on freelance gigs here and there and selling myself best I can. It's a risk away from the comfortable situation I'm used to, but I know how much I'd need to make to afford rent, food, health insurance, and the essentials. And I have a rough idea of when I'd need to swallow my pride and start looking at Regular Jobs again, if I'm not making much progress in the do-my-own-thing department. But I'm betting I can pull it off. There's no better time for a bettor (ha-ha) than right now, with a generous few months of runway in front of me.

With all this going on, I still don't think I need to take a dollar from Train Songz toward paying my bills for now. We're not set up for that, and frankly I don't think we're there yet. Maybe one day this'll be part of the whole pizza-pie of my income, since it's a heck a lot of my time, but I don't think we're there yet. If we try to make each zine better than the last, and folks keep telling their friends to subscribe, we might be there one day. I'll know when it's that time.

If you’re still reading this and thinking, “Hey, I know someone who could use this kind of help,” send 'em my way on email at conductor@trainsongz.net or via text at the Train Songz Anonymous Tip Line, (405) 225-6629.