Eight-year wait for new Split Lip Rayfield material finally over

It’s taken a while, but Split Lip Rayfield hopes it was worth the wait.

The local bluegrass-rock group, which has spent much of the past decade touring the country and playing festivals, released its first studio album in eight years earlier this month.

Wayne Gottstine, who plays mandolin in the band, said he hopes fans will appreciate the musical maturity of “On My Way.”

“It’s the same style of music – it sounds like Split Lip Rayfield,” Gottstine said. “But it’s a big guitar album – we do a lot of harmony guitar stuff on this album, and Eric (Mardis) and I both just play a lot of guitar on it. There’s still plenty of banjo and there’s still plenty of mandolin ... but this record is a bit more round.”

If you’ve seen Split Lip Rayfield live in the past couple of years, a lot of the 12 tracks on “On My Way” will sound familiar. There are “a couple” of songs on the album that are new, but the band has been playing most of the album’s material live for years now.

“We’ve been really tightening them up – that helps the evolution of the song, and it’s noticeable on the record,” Gottstine said. “The record is, I think, one of the best ones that we’ve put out. The performance of the playing on it, the singing on it is incredibly solid.”

A majority of the album was recorded at Gottstine’s house in Lawrence. The rest was finished when the band had a couple of days off due to a show cancellation while on tour.

Members holed up in the Spanish Trails Inn – a motel in Durango, Colo. – to record the rest of the album, Gottstine said.

“For all this record, we just recorded it ourselves,” Gottstine said. “It’s an independent release at this point. There’s a possibility a label could pick it up, but right now we’re just getting the record out. We’re booking shows for 2017 and getting the ball rolling.”

Split Lip Rayfield decided to record music videos for a few songs on this album as well – a first for the band, Gottstine said.

“This will be a little different style for us and a little bit different thing,” he said. “People still like videos even though MTV doesn’t play them anymore.”

The album is streaming on BandCamp and is available for purchase at the band’s website, www.splitliprayfield.com.

Split Lip Rayfield is performing in Wichita on Feb. 17 at the Cotillion.

“We’re real pleased with the collection of songs that we have, and we just wanted to share it with the people,” Gottstine said. “People have been wanting a new record, and we just wanted to give them one.”

This story was originally published January 17, 2017 at 4:41 PM with the headline "Eight-year wait for new Split Lip Rayfield material finally over."