Interview: Morgan Geer (Drunken Prayer)
When Morgan Geer was a kid, his mom — a folk singer with outlaw country music roots— made him a white jumpsuit to wear in a talent competition. Geer’s a cappella performance of “Hound Dog” won the day, and the white jumpsuit stuck — or at least the idea of the costumes we don for the audience did. As creator and front man of Drunken Prayer — or sometimes the lone man, depending on the gig — the songwriter knows of the transformation that occurs when it is time to get on stage.
“I don't really often just wear, like, jeans and a T-shirt,” says Geer, who splits his time between Asheville and Portland, OR. “There's more going on. I kind of ditched the cape this year, but I was doing a full look — like an old-timey magician or something.”
I wonder for a moment if the cape is a metaphor — some mental device Geer uses to prepare for the footlights. But right there on the cover of The Name of the Ghost is Home, his newest album released in April, is Geer’s silhouette — and it’s framed with what sure looks like a cape. So in this case, we’re speaking literally.
Geer often does deal in metaphor, though. His latest batch of songs are full of bruises and broken bones that he says speak to the psychological marks left by the double whammy of the COVID-19 pandemic and angry right-wing inflammation.
But considering Geer’s winding musical highway, it would be normal if at least some of those scrapes are the flesh-and-blood kind. The Name of the Ghost is Home unveils truths and absurdities that come from getting knocked down — as you can hear for yourself at a vinyl release show at Fleetwood’s on Saturday, Nov. 5.
You can find the unofficial and amorphous backstories of Geer’s early bands among Asheville lore: the garage rock chaos of The Merle; the rowdy, shit-kicking country numbers of The Unholy Trio; the sweaty, packed venues of mid-’90s and early 2000s - places like Vincent’s Ear, The Basement, and Broadway’s; and then Geer’s departure for parts unknown on the West Coast. For several years, there was radio silence. Then one day, Geer returned, and when he did, he came back with Drunken Prayer.
The first lines off the 2006 self-titled debut album are still grabbers: “Where the sweet Magnolia grows/There’s a river bend I know/Where time ain’t nothin’ to kill.” But soon the song gives way to self appraisal: “The spell of wasted youth/Wasted time and that’s the truth/Oh Lord, I’ve cast my pearls before the swine.”
That turn toward revelation and reflection, whether it’s contrition or caution, forges onward in The Name of the Ghost is Home: “Do as you please, break the law/Out on a limb, the sweetest fruit of all,” Geer sings on “Judas Table.” On “Land Lines and Rabbit Ears (Nachos for One),” he recounts, metaphor or not, disaster and the damage done: “I’ve wrecked hundreds of cars, fell from tall buildings/Drug by six white horses and broke 56 bones.”
But, in true Drunken Prayer style, the calamity is tempered by easy-going sanguine Americana tunes and Geer’s droll baritone. It’s a device he deploys skillfully and the tone reminds me of the old sign about not crossing a farmer’s field unless you can do it in nine seconds “because that bull can do it in 10.”
Which gets to the rabbit in Geer’s hat: The Drunken Prayer approach to the bang-ups of life, the loneliness of lockdown, and the danger at the door still leaves you with a tune in your head that makes you able whistle along even while kicking rocks.
Not to say Geer won’t unleash some smolder and smoke. The track “She’s a Heart” kicks off with a grinding distortion gothic waltz, and the album’s title track is haunting pseudo-psych dirge that even conjures Black Sabbath ghosts.
Even without the magician’s cape, Geer still has tricks up his sleeve, as evidenced by his recent chat with Asheville Stages.
Brian Postelle: You just got back from your Northwest tour. How'd that go?
Morgan Geer: It was great. It was a nice way to end the touring season. I've been going kind of nonstop since about last May. I think it was like my sixth or seventh tour this year — short ones, but it was nice to end it out there. I've got a ton of friends out there. I lived out there for about 10 years. I've got a really great band out there, too, so that was nice.
BP: You have a band out there that you play with?
MG: Yeah. I’ve got a really great band out there that I've been playing with for a few years. I've got a band here in Asheville and a band out in Portland, and then some more people I play with out of Mississippi.
BP: And you've also got a lot of a lot of great musicians on this record. How did you get everybody involved?
MG: Well, I started recording in Albuquerque [New Mexico], with some of my touring mates when I was on the road with the Handsome Family, and I was going to go back there and finish it, but that's right about when COVID hit, so I was left with drum tracks and a bunch of background tracks. So I finished the rest of it during COVID at my house and then shipped off tracks for overdubs from friends around the country.
BP: So somebody in every one of those manifestations played some part in this record?
MG: Yeah, but this one was mainly me and the guys from Albuquerque. The record before this [Cordelia Elsewhere] was mostly just Asheville people, and then the one before that [Into the Missionfield] was mostly Portland people, if that makes any sense.
BP: On the records that you've been putting out, and for the songs on this record, do you write for the record or are you sort of pulling everything from a big well of songs and seeing what fits together? How do you approach that?
MG: A little of both. I've got lots of notebooks filled with bits and pieces of ideas that I'll draw from if I need to fill in the blanks for something or start with something more as inspiration. But I usually try not to stay too married to one idea or another and kind of let the songs go where they want to. And through there. I can usually find some kind of thread that makes a proper album, thematically.
BP: You've got a few songs in here that sort of flirt on the edge of catastrophe. Both “I Wouldn't Change a Thing” and “Landlines and Rabbit Ears” reference some broken bones and some stitches here and there.
MG: It was definitely born out of the whole COVID experience, which of course is still going on. That was pretty intense. And that [was] on the back of the album I did before [Cordelia Elsewhere]. That was kind of a different kind of intensity; it's more political — the wave of right-wing politics across the country. And so you had COVID on the back of that. So these two albums, to me, the last one is kind of an extension of Cordelia, because they're both written in this time of kind of quiet panic.
BP: Yeah, and maybe we're all a little bit a little bit bruised.
MG: Yeah, it would be hard not to be. But in that experience, you can kind of find some calm in the eye of the storm, too, I think — for me, anyway. “Oasis in the Yard” is kind of like, well, throwing up your hands because there’s not a lot you can do, you know, globally.
BP: And along with that, most of your songs really do have sort of an upbeat or even a laid-back kind of character to their tunes even if you're singing, you know, about falling off buildings, getting stitches, and emergency rooms. Where do you pull that from?
MG: Well, the music usually comes first, easily. I'll have a tune stuck in my head, and then oftentimes it's kind of like writing in tongues where you just kind of let it go with what rolls off the tongue. But there's something about the duality of having dynamic lyrics work against what the tune otherwise is doing. And most of the music I'm thinking of when I'm coming up with this stuff is usually pretty sing-song stuff, almost to a lullaby. And then you start adding guitars and piano and kind of orchestrating, and it morphs into something else.
BP: Yeah, I feel like I can picture you sort of noodling around on a piano and coming up with these little chord changes that lift and come around, and then figure out where they go.
MG: Yeah, it's an evolving process. Some of them, I like just as they are; just kind of at their raw form. And others… I have to be comfortable playing this music, too. I sometimes write for other people, and it's a whole lot easier because I don't have to sing that stuff. I could just purely write a song that worked — beginning, middle, and end. But when it's for me, it has to feel all right in my mouth. It's gotta be something, just a word, I would [normally] say.
BP: I'd like to talk about your voice — like, your literal voice. In a genre, in sort of a musical world where a lot of folks throw on affectations and things like that, you don't. Your voice is a solid singing voice, but I can recognize it even when I'm talking to you that it's your voice, not an impersonation of a “Country Voice.”
MG: Yeah, that's interesting. Well, when I moved to Portland, I feel like I started doing pretty OK pretty quick as far as being able to get gigs and some kind of a draw, and a lot of it was this kind of perceived authenticity, or real authenticity, in that kind of Americana/roots/garage rock community. But I was also kind of hyper-aware of my friends who had put on these really thick accents and they didn't really realize they were doing it. It's kind of like if you go to an Irish music night, people have these phantom Irish accents that they put on. And to me, it's just kind of phony.
BP: I mean, I'll go back and listen to some things going on in the early 2000s and some are pushing the Jay Farrar voice as far as they could take it.
MG: Yeah, that's so common, and it's easy to do. I'll go back and listen to my stuff and it's real cringey. Because, man, I'm singing like my heroes instead of just myself. And I also don't really like the sound of my voice, and I’m just kind of fed up with it. So there's that going on — a lot of baggage with it.
BP: Did you have a musical upbringing?
MG: My mom's a folk singer. She was in basically in the outlaw country world, living in New Orleans. She would go to Austin and play sometimes, and that's my earliest memories — of her singing. Then her dad before her was in a Dixieland jazz band till he died in his 90s. He played banjo, clarinet. It was a real musical family. His parents and their parents were involved in the symphony in Mobile, Alabama, so it's always been around. It's always been kind of an honorable pursuit; it was never looked down upon, like, “Get a real job.” It's whatever you have to do to keep the ball rolling.
BP: So when did Drunken Prayer sort of manifest in your head?
MG: It started in Portland. I was looking for any kind of gigs I could get up there and ended up playing this biker hangout out there that was like a neutral zone between a couple of different biker gangs on Sunday mornings. And I knew a shitload of gospel songs, so we just did that on Sunday mornings for, like, two or three hours and then ended up calling it “Drunken Prayer.” It’s kind of a weird full circle. I'm doing a gospel album now down in Mississippi with some of the Fat Possum [Records] folks.
BP: Did coming up with Drunken Prayer change your music style at all?
MG: Well, it kind of merged with just this idea. I’d been in kind of this honky-tonk band before that, and I was just kind of tired of the form. I wanted to do something where I could be a little more personal — personally rewarding, as opposed to playing what felt like someone else's music. So, it's kind of like slowing down country music. I've always had this idea of playing country like Hound Dog Taylor plays his blues in this really ramshackle, see-how-it-goes, genre-mixing situation. That's kind of how it got started and it's evolved as my life has evolved.
BP: This show that you're playing at Fleetwood's, you’ve got it billed as your vinyl release party.
MG: Yeah, we’ve had the CDs for a few months and were lucky enough to have Cascade Record Printers out in Oregon bump up production for us because it had taken so long. It's taken everybody a long time to get vinyl, and they had it out for these last Northwest shows. I thought it'd be fun to do something here in town. I'll have a full band for that.
BP: That was my next question, if it was going to be a solo show or band show, because you do both.
MG: Yeah, I go by Drunken Prayer for everything. People tend to misspell my last name, so I just kind of ditched ever going by that. If you’re playing in a place where nobody knows one way or the other what they're gonna do that night, I'd rather go see Drunken Prayer than Morgan Geer, I think.
BP: So, what's your head like when you're getting ready for either one of those?
MG: Well, you know, it's a weird thing to get up on stage and sing a song, just existentially. Sometimes I catch myself, like, “What am I doing here?” What drives someone…it's just a weird thing for a human being to do. You don't see a lot of other animals doing that kind of thing. But there's some kind of drive for… I mean, for me, we can play armchair psychiatrist and it would be like a need for approval and applause, which is something you can't really get enough of, if that's your goal. But it's just fun, kind of in just a theatrical sense to put on a show.
BP: Do you pick different songs based on whether you're going to be solo or with a band?
MG: Yeah, totally. Yeah, there's some that are just kind of wordy and slow. These last few tours with bands I've kept it to 90% faster than mid-tempo, more kind of stuff that a bar full of people would enjoy. And, sure enough, bars full of people do enjoy it. It depends on the venue, too.
BP: On this new record, you do have some of those sort of quieter, more intimate songs. But then, of course, the title track, you're kind of playing with fire a little bit with that one. It sounds like you're just about to burst open on that one.
MG: Yeah, I'm really happy with that one. That might be my favorite song on the album. We played it at a couple of shows in the Northwest, and it's so monotonous, you know? It's almost just like this mantra, but it kind of works as its own song. It was an afterthought — well, not really an afterthought, but I couldn't really expand on it or make it even better than just that line. I tried, but I think it works as it is. It kind of puts a bow around the rest of the songs.
The last one on the double vinyl, side four, is a thing called “Electric Daddyland” I did after my dad died. There's a bunch of voice messages he left on my phone, and then I kind of set them to music. It's a really long, kind of almost Indian death raga.
BP: I listened to that on your BandCamp, but, yeah, that one really shook me up.
MG: Yeah, I had someone say that they liked it, but that they were working through it. That’s good; I'll take that. I never expected to release that. My wife convinced me to. It's just something I made for my sister and my stepmom as kind of like, “Well, you know, there's nothing I can do to really help, but here's what I do every day.” I had all these voicemails and that was…that was a weird song to edit.
BP: I'm a big fan of songs that leave you thinking, leave you something to digest and turn over in your head. That's one of my favorite things. There's definitely some good stuff and some good turns of phrase on this record that have me thinking, so I appreciate it. Thanks for putting it out.
MG: Absolutely! I'm glad you're getting something out of it.
Author’s Note: After conducting the interview above, Geer announced an upcoming solo show at the Grey Eagle, so if you have ever had the desire to see Drunken Prayer in both full band and solo incarnations, here is your chance!
IF YOU GO
Who: Drunken Prayer vinyl release show (full band) w/ Lo Wolf and comedian Jamie Stirling
When: Saturday, Nov. 5, 8 p.m.
Where: Fleetwood’s, 496 Haywood Road, fleetwoodschapel.com
Tickets: $10
Who: Drunken Prayer (solo)
When: Sunday, Nov. 13, 5 p.m.
Where: The Grey Eagle patio, 185 Clingman Ave., thegreyeagle.com
Tickets: $10 advance/$12 day of show
(Photos by Christa de Mayo)
