Drunken Prayer (AKA Freakwater’s Morgan Geer) is releasing its fifth album, Cordelia Elsewhere, mixed by Mitch Easter (Let’s Active, REM), on Friday, April 5, 2019 via Deer Lodge Records.
The music on Cordelia Elsewhere is a direct, if slightly eccentric, descendent of outlaw country. These are stories of superstition, civil war and “triple stacks blocking out the sun”. The more upbeat numbers on the album were hatched on a tour across Europe with Morgan’s other band, alt-country goths, Freakwater. The rest were finished on a trip through the Bible Belt that began on Tuesday, November 8, 2016. The songs collectively bear witness to life on frighteningly shaky ground.
“Drunken Prayer is one of the most original acts I have heard. In this day and age of formulaic songwriting, Drunken Prayer has charted its own course. As a singer songwriter, Morgan Geer is unique. Definitely appealing and worth checking out.”
– Morty Wiggins (Bill Graham Presents, A&M Records, Second Octave)
Morgan Christopher Geer was born in San Francisco and grew up traveling around the US, following his folk-singing mother. Today he splits time between Portland, OR and Asheville, NC. He’s lived in nearly every region of the country and sounds like it. His is American music – straight, no irony chaser.
Drunken Prayer will likely bring to mind The Band for a lot of listeners, with the sense of place and tradition. But Morgan Geer’s songs and his singing often suggest a kinship with artists like Bobby Charles or Doug Sahm, musicians with Southern roots, with a yip and break to their voices, and notes of sadness offset by a wicked sense of humor.
Over the past two years Drunken Prayer has played hundreds of shows across 18 countries and across the US at venues such as the Pickathon Music Festival and San Francisco’s Great American Music Hall. Geer’s music has been featured on AMC, NPR, WFMU and SiriusXM.
Recently Morgan has been touring internationally, solo, with The Handsome Family.
“Morgan Geer is the real thing – a songwriter with a heart as deep as the Marianas Trench and sensitive as the wet hands of a raccoon.”
– Rennie Sparks, The Handsome Family