An American Prayer Beckley WV

An American Prayer

The Doors

Elektra, 1978

REVIEW BY: Bruce Rusk

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED: 10/23/2007

An American Prayer was released seven years after the death of Jim Morrison. An homage to one of music's most original and unique lyricists, the album features Jim reading his own poetry and lyrics recorded shortly before his death, backed with instrumental tracks by the three surviving Doors.

A line from one of the tracks, “Ghost Song,” is an excellent metaphor for the experience of listening to this for the first time: “We have assembled inside this ancient and insane theatre to propagate our lust for life and flee the swarm of wisdom's restraints.”

A fitting description for this look inside the dark, fertile mind of Morrison. Jim always pushed the limits and flirted on the edge of sanity, legality and death his entire life. He lived with the lust and reckless abandon of someone indifferent to the consequences of his actions, intent only on the experience itself and how people would react to it.

Morrison's poetry has been dismissed and heavily criticized as rambling and unfocused. Often he was accused of just trying to be shocking with his use of crude language and references to sex, drugs and death. I find a savage sort of beauty to it. Crude as some of it may be, it's brutally honest and I always get the feeing of Jim laying out his dark and often twisted thoughts in their raw, unfiltered totality and just stepping back to say "That’s what I think about. I don’t care it you love it or hate it, but there it is.”