I Like Train Songs Too

Track 10 on the new Billy Strings record is titled “I Like Train Songs.” That’s never been a secret of his, nor a secret of the genre he operates within. He didn’t need to hide it and he’s not starting now. Fine. I like train songs too. I like train songs. There, I said it. This is fun, right?

Except the new record is not a joke record. “So Much For Goodbyes” is about the loss of his mother. “I Like Train Songs” is sitting right in the middle of that grief, like the stupid joke I’m going to make at my dad’s funeral; not because it’s funny, but because feeling it for six hours straight just isn’t possible.

None of this is a bit. We’ve gotten so used to hearing songs about trains that we’ve forgotten that they do actual work. Carrying you away from something, and eventually, carrying you to the end of it.

Free Percussion

Now I’m no musicologist, but I sure as hell know what a train sounds like next to a banjo. Stripped down to its bare bones, the train provides a dead consistent rhythm.

Bluegrass grew up without a drum kit, so something else had to take that job; the stomping foot, the banjo roll, the guitar chugging low. Without even trying, the train provides a steady, relentless, moving beat. Anyone who has ever stood by a track as a 100-car freighter meanders by knows that the sound is halfway to a song.

That’s the part of the history that I trust myself to say. As soon as it gets a little deeper, like the Depression-era hopping boxcars because there was nowhere else to go, I have no authority to explain it. I know it happened, I just can’t narrate it like I was there. I’m also not going to fake it for a paragraph of setup. What I can tell you, is that sometime between then and now, the train became more than just a sound.

Nobody’s Riding the Boxcar

To put it as simply as possible, the train is freedom. It represents the person we’re all jealous of, the drifter vagabond who doesn’t have much. The guy who climbs onto an open, moving car with nothing but a bag and a guitar. The guy who rides off into the sunset in search of what’s really out there.

These songs tell that story, they sell that image, and it works. It’s a great story, just not our story.

I’ve chased tour. I’ve taken planes, trains and automobiles on my own to make it to that non-negotiable show. I’ve wandered the lot, held my finger in the air, traded stickers for loosie cigarettes, eaten 143245 grilled cheeses, all while feeling freer than I ever do at my cubicle. But not a single second of those experiences had anything to do with riding an empty boxcar. I requested the PTO two weeks in advance. I paid for the gas, tickets, and hotel rooms with a credit card that has my name on it.

The vast majority of people at these shows are able to be there because they have something stable to go back to. That’s the truth that I don’t think we like to look at. We bought a myth created by those who had no other option, and now we use it to describe a luxury that we get to have.

We get to leave and we get to go back. That’s the difference between us and the drifter who we hear about in the songs. As long as we pretend hard enough, it won’t ruin the fantasy.

They Know

Back on April 13, 2024, Billy played an entire train themed set in Tampa, FL. The entire first set, start to finish, just covering songs about trains. They walked onstage to the sound of a train leaving the station playing over the PA, and chugged through “Slow Train” (Larry Sparks), “Old Train” (The Seldom Scene), “Freight Train” (Elizabeth Cotton), “Ridin’ That Midnight Train” (Ralph Stanley), and even admitted “I’d Like To Be A Train” (Larry Sparks).

The end of the set came after a rendition of Phish’s “Back On The Train,” which was covered in a similarly-themed set by Daniel Donato of Daniel Donato’s Cosmic Country fame. Only a few months before Billy’s show in Tampa, during their Halloween run in 2023, Cosmic Country did their “Trick or Train” show in Milwaukee.

Two different bands, two different leads, two different cities, two (kind of) different genres, and they both took the room for a ride on the proverbial boxcar. Could be a coincidence, but for the sake of this piece, it’s a shared reference point.

It’s a fitting reference point, because if the Grateful Dead is the grandpa of modern jam music, Phish is the daddy. We love their gimmicks, which is part of the reason we keep going back. You never know when their setlist structure is going to be curated in some unique way that some nerd is going to figure out the next morning. Jokes, references, callbacks, patterns that they build a whole night around. So when Billy and Donato both reach for a Phish tune to pull their themed sets together, I like to think it is a nod to the band that is famous for doing exactly that.

Which would mean that nobody involved is doing this by accident. Phish built a legacy rewarding the obsessive listener. Anyone playing a Phish song about a train during a train themed set is speaking that language on purpose.

The Other Direction

“I Like Train Songs” sits right in the middle of a story about grief, right where it makes no sense and right where it belongs completely. I likened it earlier to the dumb thing I’d say at a funeral, but I truly don’t think it’s a joke at all. I think it could be one of the most honest songs on the record.

The train is a machine. It has no feelings, no allegiances. No matter where it’s taking you, it runs on the same tracks and it makes the same sound. We just decide which direction we want to hear it going, off to the bigger and better or to the end of the line.

When you’re running off halfway across the country to follow a band, the train is pulling you towards more life. When you’re listening to that same song after your mother is gone, those chugging beats and melodies sound like something else. Something that won’t stop for you.

Of course Billy didn’t accidentally throw a goofy song in the middle of a grief record. He wrote the same song twice. One in each key, a different melody for two distinct feelings. He let it sit in the middle of the record so you’d feel that whiplash yourself.

Nobody wants to write, “I Like Songs About My Own Mortality,” so they write about a train. The train lets you say the thing without actually saying it. It’s freedom until it isn’t. It’s leaving until it’s the last thing that leaves.

I think that’s why we didn’t get bored of the myth 50 years ago. If it were just about freedom, we would’ve left the train metaphor right by the side of the track like all the other things that don’t hold weight.

We keep coming back to this, because some part of us knows that the other direction is coming. The train song lets us express that in a room full of people that just came to dance the night away.

Get On Anyway

So yeah. I like train songs too, Billy. They kick ass.

Every time I hear one, at a show, in a car, or on a record about somebody’s late mother, it’s doing two jobs at once. It’s selling me a version of freedom that I don’t live, and rehearsing for the last trip I’ll ever take.

On track 10, Billy wrote that down plainly enough that I couldn’t pretend I hadn’t seen it myself. The train keeps going, I keep getting on, some part of me always knows where it’s headed.