How Drunken Prayer's New Album Could Save Your Soul

Gospel music – true, deep gospel – is as Southern as chocolate gravy. And it’s just as good if done right and the biscuits ain’t store bought. 

Drunken Prayer, the Mobile-born artist and current Asheville, North Carolina native Morgan Geer, brings the truth, the reality, the slight grit behind the songs of gospel in his new album Thy Burdens. Made with Drive-by Truckers and Dexateens’ bassist Matt Patton at Dial Back Sound, the album bursts at the seams with bona fides, and not merely with the music: speak with Matt Patton after any show, and he finds a place to discuss his beginnings when playing gospel in a church band as a kid; Geer himself innately knows a plethora of gospel tunes from – who else? – his grandmother’s hymn book. Combined with the addition of outstanding studio players, Thy Burdens shines brighter than any bullshit church singing on Sunday asking for your dime. 

Thy Burdens opens with literal sunlight with the opening line of “Selfishness of Man,” not with the hell-fire-and-brimstone insanity heard in many country churches still to this day. Because true, rich gospel centers on hope, comfort, love, and happiness. Geer realizes as much; he must, as he earned his moniker of Drunken Prayer playing gospel tunes in – get this! – a biker bar on Sunday afternoon. Yet “Selfishness of Man,” taken from Leon Payne, doesn’t shy away from reality. “Tiny fingers could become a killer’s hand,” Geer sings in a voice that’s not gruff, but palpable. He could be your own daddy singing beside you in church, if your daddy was a pronounced vocalist. Geer avoids the guttural exposures many singers would employ to convey the groundedness of the truth of these old songs, yet he manages both to express them in candor and in a  mannered fashion to breath the life to all ten tracks, even those heard so frequently in church. 

Familiar titles like “A Closer Walk With Thee” and “Rock of Ages” drop the infused sadness and instead ramp up toe-tapping energy with wailing slide guitar and a boogie oft forgotten in the joy of religion in the time period of which he borrows, which is both then and now. 

Perhaps it's the reverb-drenched opening guitar of “Am I Soldier of the Cross” through the tube amp turned up to ten paired with the relaxing horn section that signifies that this set of new and old gospel numbers is not a cheap nor modern Christian rock crock of shit. Enter Geer’s voice: one of a grown man, one you may hear at a country church on Sunday who’s not quite ready for the crisp and clean gospel quartet that’ll be playing that night for an extra ten dollars from a working man’s pocket. Instead, it’s perfect, perfect for uplifting, perfect for the joy of hard-lived and hard-earned fun forgotten and now found in the gospel. 

The highlight, though, comes midway on the record with the traditional “Ezekiel Saw the Wheel,” perhaps more known from Johnny Cash singing the number on an 1982 Christmas televised performance. With Drunken Prayer, though, the playing, singing, and sheer fun soar and emote, blending Bakersville licks with upbeat drumming, heart-lifting church organ, note-perfect background singing, start-and-stop guitars, and Geer’s voice, a balance of raw honesty and singing that sits perfectly in the mix.   

The entire album flies high – higher than any gospel album not penned by Bill Monroe or the Louvin Brothers – even in its quieter moments. It’s not only because of Geer, but with the help of the previously mentioned Patton on bass and co-producing. Geer also recruits Jay Gonzalez (Drive-by Truckers) on keys, Xandy Chelmis (Wednesday, MJ Lenderman) on pedal steel, Ed Jurdi (Band of Heathens) slithering on slide, as well as appearances by the infamous Jimbo Mathus himself and many more. 

If only these fucking modern churches, where jeans, khakis, short-sleeve Henley shirts are not just acceptable but the norm, along god-awful “bands” barely playing such bullshit they’re calling praise songs, whatever the hell that is, would take a page from Drunken Prayer, maybe they’d have more parishioners. They’d certainly have less assholes singing only to be on stage because they couldn’t make it elsewhere.  

Like Rick Bragg writes in Ava’s Man, “Just because a man is drunk does not mean he cannot speak to the Lord.” 

Amen.

Thy Burdens is available online and in all record stores today, June 6, 2025.