Drunken Prayer — with Taylor Hollingsworth
Menacing Americana / Folk-Art-Punk-Blues • $5 Cover At Door
TAYLOR HOLLINGSWORTH • FOLK-ART-PUNK-BLUES • 8:00PM
Alabama-born and -raised, quick-fingered Taylor Hollingsworth plays guitar like he was born in the 1930s, time-traveled to the future, and then came back to the present.
Hollingsworth’s cosmic approach to guitar is second to none. Finger-picking a Silvertone axe with those luscious lipstick pick-ups, Hollingsworth is punk-bred bluesman with an artful indie bend who’s made a name for himself across the globe with his “classic” style of songwriting.
Straight out of the cassette player in a beat-up ’78 VW camper, the poorest kid in the richest zip code in Alabama, bottom ten of his high school class, with three broken guitars and a four-track recorder, Hollingsworth writes, plays & records what he calls Folk-Art-Punk-Blues.
He recently released his ninth solo album, Country Visions and is the focal singer & songwriter in Dead Fingers, sharing harmonic vocal twists with his wife on songs like “Ring Around Saturn” and “Another Planet.” Taylor is also the lead guitar player for Conor Oberst and the Mystic Valley Band and wrote & sang “Air Mattress” & “Snake Hill” on their Outer South album.
His song “Dominos” was covered by Conor Oberst & Phoebe Bridgers in their collaboration, Better Oblivion Community Center, and was ranked 11th in Paste Magazine’s best cover songs of 2019.
DRUNKEN PRAYER • MENACING AMERICANA • 9:30PM
Morgan Geer is the American singer/songwriter/guitarist behind Drunken Prayer, writing & performing songs which transcend the bounds of Americana and that could have emerged from a highly blissed-out biker bar or a swampy ashram.
Rennie Sparks of The Handsome Family calls Geer “the real thing—a songwriter with a heart as deep as the Mariana Trench and as sensitive as the wet hands of a raccoon”. Writing in CREEM Magazine, Robert Duncan says that “Drunken Prayer is Americana in the sense that America is a place of menace, hybrid vigor and unending strangeness”.
Drunken Prayer’s newest album is 2022’s The Name Of The Ghost Is Home, which Geer worked on from his home studio with Paul Oldham (Bonnie “Prince” Billy, Royal Trux), building on tracks initially recorded in New Mexico at Empty House Studios. The end result evokes an ominous acid Western feedback-and-driftwood aesthetic.
Other recent Drunken Prayer releases are 2019’s acclaimed LP Cordelia Elsewhere, mixed by Mitch Easter (Let’s Active, REM) and the ambitious 17 minute long death-raga, Electric Daddyland from 2021.
Before the pandemic, Drunken Prayer played hundreds of shows across 18 countries and across the US at venues including the Newport Folk Festival, Pickathon and San Francisco’s Great American Music Hall. Geer’s music has been featured on AMC, NPR, WFMU and SiriusXM.
On the side, Geer is the lead guitar player for alt-country goths Freakwater and writes for different artists including the Brooklyn rock-and-soul phenom Bette Smith. He has also been touring internationally, opening for and often joining the eccentric Handsome Family.
Geer splits his time between Portland, OR and Asheville, NC.
