Before we get going: this is an email, but it's also kind of a "blog." (Welcome back, 2002!) If you go to smokestack.trainsongz.net, you can make an account and leave comments on the post...let me know you're out there...

Happy Monday everyone. Welcome aboard Smokestack, the newest tentacle in the ever-growing Content Covenant between Songz Corp. and its community, of which you are an integral part. The genesis of this covenant was a meme I made and posted on July 27, 2023, and in the surprisingly wet and wild trip down life's tracks since then, I've bought more stamps than I ever thought I would in my life and these 4.25" by 5.5" booklets keep invading my apartment every three months. They started out small enough, but they keep getting bigger. Please, somebody, help me.

Between the memes and the zines, I regret to inform you that I see a happy medium in a sort of "subscribers-only Monday morning email." The goal—same as it was with the zine—is to break through content over-saturation, but in a more informal and constant way.

(If this already has you thinking Another Damn Email is not what you need in your life, and you want to keep this relationship purely physical (media), hit me back and I'll take you off the list.)

Today's dispatch includes: An introduction to Smokestack, Team Songz returns to Nashville, and a zine 6 update.

Things to click on: Sam Grisman & Friends at Dee's Country Cocktail Lounge, Valley Flower, Promontory Paul and I on a podcast talking about the zeeen and why Billy Strings shows are like baseball games, which is apparently not an original thought (nothing is) because David Gans made the same point about Grateful Dead shows long ago, and speaking of "music baseball" there's a "musician-centered sandlot baseball club" in New York City called FUMBL (Formerly Unemployed Musicians Baseball League) also just performed an extravaganza at the Brooklyn folk watering hole Jalopy. Trend forecast: music baseball on the UP!

All hail e-mail, baby!

I'm embarrassed to admit I got a little too excited about the concept of a weekly email. I swore email off! The zine itself, in fact, was a reaction to the over-saturation of today's media environment. Everyone's got a newsletter! Everyone's got a podcast! Everyone's got a meme account! But print? Showing up consistently in your audiences' physical mailbox? You've got to be a real sicko to print our your writing and stuff envelopes full of it...

But it worked! And I hope it continues to work. I don't want the print to go anywhere! Print's not dead! I'm grateful for your support as subscribers to give us the financials we need to make the zine and invest in new contributors and processes to make my life easier.

Digging into the work on our sixth issue, I feel like we're locking into a pretty good rhythm to make four zines a year. And in the current state of the program, where all of us have day jobs (tbh we'll probably always have day jobs) it's not realistic to send out more than four zines per year. It's a ton of work, and as soon as we finish one we start working on the next.

At the same time, I'm trying to spend a wee bit less time churning out memes and opening Instagram 6,281 times per day to feel Good Chemicals. I want to post content and sling messages when something pops into my head, but it became literally impossible for one person to keep up with all the notifications, and I want to get away from "making a meme" as a daily to-do list item. (Yes, that was a real thing in my life for most of last year. Content is king and I am its humble servant.)

I'd rather post as things pop into my head, and I'm having an intervention with myself about my Instagram screen time. It's bad. It's been bad, honestly. Zuck got my brain hooked good! It feels delicious to make little internet jokes and receive positive reactions to them and gain new followers! Douse me in likes and drown me in notifications! Yeah—I need help. While the account may be a little more dormant, I know it's for the best for my focus, and therefore the quality of all the content coming out of Songz Corp.

Which brings me to email...I like writing! The writing in the zine is very specific. It's high-stakes, in a way, because there's only room for like 3500 or so total words, which unlike writing a high school English paper is actually less than you think when you're enjoying yourself and love what you're writing about.

With each new issue of the zine, I also want to continue welcoming in new voices and contributors to add their own experiences and perspectives to the "readable tour poster" we publish every three months. So this is like casual writing and a way for us to keep in touch once a week outside of Instagram. (I'm working on recreating the Instagram grid off Instagram, because I know some of you are already fully off social media, and others want to check it less. Once I finish that project, it will be linked at the top of every Smokestack I send.)

Ultimately I want Smokestack to be a trusted front page for our very niche corner of the internet. Something you open and know you'll find like one or two good things in, and is worth opening versus deleting immediately. "Substack, for niche freaks like us." Wish me luck!

A city for the girls, with a side of arenagrass

Nashville's Broadway—or "Night Out U.S.A," as Promontory Paul calls it—is hilarious. Nashville is one of the only places I've been to a weekend run of shows where you can't really feel the Billy Circus more than like fifty feet from the venue. Sure, there's a heady brewery pop-up going on and some trademark tie-dye if you poke around with your eyeballs, but hoards of bachelorette parties and college formals are two heavyweights that the arenagrass faithful can't outmatch in the same way they can in, say, Worcester or Asheville or Denver.

And if I'm going to keep on riffing stereotypes and painting with too broad of a brush, I'd also say a Billy show in "Music City U.S.A" has more casual fans than your average Billy show, since the town is full of big wigs and fat cats named Johnny Columbiarecords and Susy Sonymusic, who frequent the Lexus Lounge at Bridgestone Arena on the Company Card.

(Can someone please get them a zine? The industry is starved for print!)

Nashville rocked, though, other than when my boy passed out flat on his face because he got a little hot in the pit (he's all good), or when the zine's design director got leveled by a gargantuan man stumbling out of a bar who had the heft of someone who should've been playing fullback for the Titans yet who must've drank enough alcohol to tranquilize a horse (she's bruised but ultimately okay, though we can't say the same about the other guy).

Those who tuned into my Instagram Stories whining over the last month or so might've caught on that I was looking after a group of seven (count 'em—seven) to get GA tickets, and we planned the trip after the on-sale date, so we were in an arranged marriage with the secondary ticket marketplace. And hoo boy, was she hot! Listings would be up on Cashortrade for like five seconds and be gone.

However, thanks to my quick lighting-fast thumbs (see: debilitating phone addiction) and a few kind Train Songz community members who reached out, we were able to lock down seven floors for the first night and five for the second.

Thankfully, though we were unable to find two more floors for Saturday, we were miracled two seats like two hours before the show from a kind couple who wasn't able to make the second night of their two-day pass. They refused payment, but we were able to get them some Train Songz merchandise in return.

The lot of us seven ticket-voracious tourists would like to formally apologize for being Yet Another Big Group Of Guys Having A Reunion In An Airbnb In East Nashville, and we hope we did not disrupt your beautiful city too much by giving business to Yet Another Soulless And Haphazardly Painted Short-Term Rental. (Great backyard, though, which Promontory Paul and Brakeman blessed by picking a banjo, a guitar, and the Casio DG-20 one of 'em bought out of friendly bootlegger's van.)

Zine 6 update

She's coming together... We have a theme, we have cover artists, data analytics are done, and one big article is done. We are working real hard on the aesthetics of this one and rethinking the process of how the whole thing comes together. Trying to be a little less "go! go! go! more! more! more!" and a little more thoughtful about piecing the whole thing together. As we all get more comfortable working together, we want to move beyond such a rigid interior: "less Word doc, more punk rock." That wasn't supposed to rhyme, but it did, and now I'm gonna text that to our designer. (Pic above as proof—worthy of a coveted !! reaction.)

It should be out around April 4, or 11, and I'll be sweating if it's after the 18th because that's a full three months after the last one came out and I'll be damned if it's not a quarterly publication! April 4 would mean we could have it (or a smaller "lot version" of it, tbd) on lot in St. Augustine...so that's the goal, stay tuned if we can pull it off...we won't rush it, and we'll ask for a week or two of patience, if we need it. I know you're good for it, and I thank you all for that. What a joy this weird little community is! Thanks for being part of it.

I think you should be able to comment on this? Did you enjoy it? That would be a lot of fun for me, so please say what's up if you see this? I'll be in the comment section at my desk today, if anyone's out there.