Decade of last.fm scrobbling countdown:
38. Split Lip Rayfield (789 plays)
Top track (46 plays): Thief, from Never Make It Home (2001)
Featured track: Barnburner, from Split Lip Rayfield (1998)

I chose the soundtrack to my four years in Texas appropriately: 92.5 The Outlaw. Poor San Antone lost its favored child–the only country station in the area that focused specifically on bands from Texas and the surrounding region–about a year after I left. (The owners thought they could make more money by instead offering another ultra-right Rick Perry-worshipping neo nazi talk show station.) Well, I didn’t actually ever hear Wichita, Kansas-based Split Lip Rayfield on The Outlaw anyway, oddly enough, but I did stumble upon them while listening to last.fm radio playlists of Texas country bands. It’s not like I’d never heard boisterous, edgy folk music before; the stuff The Outlaw was spinning had more balls than half the heavy metal out there. But to hear it in bluegrass was still a bit of a novelty to me at the time, and to hear it with this degree of technical proficiency blew me away.

They/their label unfortunately seems to have fallen pray to that fallacy that non-mainstream file sharing diminishes revenue–as if people just randomly buy albums from groups they’ve never heard without sampling a track or two first–so I can’t offer any studio selections, but the live video I’m showcasing here was one of the first recordings of the band I ever heard. In retrospect, it was a huge influence on my own personal guitar style. A bit of guitarist and singer Kirk Rundstrom’s total disregard for any supposedly necessary point of transition from acoustic to electric guitar has resonated in everything I’ve written or performed since. Sad to say, he tragically passed away of esophageal cancer right around the time I started listening to them. Rest in peace.