💨 Songz creep

Train Songz was born as a creative outlet for a bored, comfortable version of my past self. For the first time in my professional life, I wasn't working odd hours six days per week. I was making more money and working less hours. I had a desk job I could roll into at ten in the morning that was reliably chill by three in the afternoon every day of the week. With my day job on autopilot, the memes and the zines became an outlet for my creativity and hyperactivity.

I'd stay at my desk until five or whatever to keep appearances, but the last two hours of my day were for Train Songz: making memes, responding to emails and DMs, writing planning issues, and dreaming up new ideas. On days I'd work from home — which was whenever I wanted to — I'd be on video calls while numbering covers, packing merchandise, and stuffing envelopes.

This was an unreasonably cushy relationship with a job, and the universe finally caught up with me when all but one member of the marketing team got laid off last spring. It was ultimately good for me to knock myself out of a little bit of professional complacency, but as I said at the top of this piece, that incredibly mellow environment allowed me to channel and unreasonable amount of time and energy into Train Songz.

When I got back up and working again in June, I started freelancing. I had a few months of severance pay and wanted to ease back into working part-time before jumping back into a full-time job. Seven months later, I'm still living that 1099 lifestyle. I even have two freelancers under me who help me out, since work has picked up and I've figured out what I can delegate and what I should do myself.

This transition has been a wild ride — a rollercoaster of feeling like you know what you're doing, questioning everything, enjoying the independence, dreading the independence, not having enough work, gaining clients, taking on waaaaaaay too much work, and losing clients because you're overextended and not doing anything well. I have certainly lost some paying clients because I favored unpaid Train Songz work over what they needed done at that moment. Hell yeah, brother.

The gnarliest part of going from professionally bored to professionally overworked has been managing my relationship with Train Songz. I no longer had time during the day to respond to emails and DMs, plan issues, list shows when Jarrod was or wasn't wearing overalls in order to crunch the numbers on the likelihood of train songs played based on the mandolinist's sartorial choices, pitch new sponsors, and whatever else.

My old job had enabled me to develop some awful habits of always being "on" for Train Songz, responding to emails and DMs and thinking of what to post throughout the day. That was possible at the fakest email job of all time, but that's no longer possible today. And up until today, I've been unconsciously doing it: I'll check Train Songz DMs and get back to five or six between meetings...and, what the heck, maybe just one quick email to get back to a subscriber's question about a lost issue.

I took a day off last Friday to fly down to Nashville and see Sam Grisman Project's magical show at the Ryman celebrating Peter Rowan for a total of 22 hours in Nashville, getting out before the blizzard rolled through on Saturday. Sometime on the flight over, it hit me that maybe — just maybe — it's not the healthiest habit to be "on" with Train Songz all the time. Lo and behold, I did about fifteen minutes of searching around online and discovered that it's actually pretty taxing for your brain to always be switching between tasks and roles like that. Who knew!

Over the next month, I'm going to test out setting aside dedicated hours for Train Songz stuff. Luckily my main client right now is on Pacific Time, which means I'm three hours ahead on God's Time (ET) so I have some wiggle room in the mornings, before I'm expected to be consciously available for the hand that feeds. During this window I'll give as much as I can to Train Songz, and come 11 ET I'll tie myself to my laptop like Odysseus' strategy to resist the sirens. My sirens are the hits of dopamine I'm reliant on from checking Train Songz notifications, DMs, emails, etc.

This is going to be a scary experiment. My incessant focus on Train Songz comes from a place of love and passion, but also fear — fear that I'll lose what I've built if I take my foot off the gas. Fear of missing a DM that'll change everything. Fear of not posting enough and not reaching enough new subscribers and all existing subscribers leaving because the zine was a fun gimmick for a year but not something folks are interested in collecting year over year over year. The usual.

But I have a good feeling about what'll happen after I "set boundaries." The restriction will allow me to fully give my focus to Train Songz when it's time to give to Train Songz, while also tricking myself to caring more about work during the day. I've found it especially hard to trick myself into caring about work after starting this thing, as it's quite difficult to compete with the motivation you feel working really hard on something you started yourself.

If all goes well, you might not even notice a change on your end at all. The memes will still post. The zines will land in your mailbox. I'll still get back to your DMs and emails. If anything, I hope you notice a change that Train Songz's output has improved, as I carve out more space to focus and spend less time and energy paying the tax of task-switching thousands of times per day.

Train songs are often about a longing for an escape from confinement and a promise of freedom. Train Songz has certainly offered me one. Maybe a little too good of one.

Thanks for reading, and give me a shout if you have a similar experience balancing a few different jobs at once. Respond to this email or send Train Songz a DM. I'll leave you with this, thank you again to Peter Rowan, Sam Grisman Project, and all of the incredible featured musicians for an unforgettable night of music on Friday.