The Doors released An American Prayer through Elektra on November 17, 1978. Jim Morrison’s voice came from recordings made in 1969 and 1970; Ray Manzarek, Robby Krieger and John Densmore reunited to compose and record music around it. The cover foregrounded Morrison’s name and credited the music to The Doors, reflecting an album built around his work as a poet.
Morrison had died in 1971, and the surviving trio had continued with Other Voices and Full Circle before separating in 1973. Their return to his tapes required a different way of working. In a February 1979 interview later published by Goldmine, Manzarek said they had deliberately waited for the sensational attention surrounding Morrison’s death to subside. He described the record as something listeners could sit with, reading and listening through an evening.
Giving that experience a shape took considerable editing. Producer and engineer John Haeny recalled in his account of the project that the team used transcripts, index cards and a large corkboard to organize the recordings. Many poems had no titles, so opening lines helped identify them. Moving those cards around gave the collaborators a way to work out a sequence. Filmmaker Frank Lisciandro approached that sequence as a life story, moving from childhood toward death. In an interview with Steven P. Wheeler published in 2017, he described working on “a film without visuals.” With Morrison’s recordings transferred to 16mm audio stock, Lisciandro could cut and rearrange them using film-editing equipment. He prepared sections in Santa Barbara and took them to Los Angeles for the group to hear. Temporary music helped suggest the direction; as the musicians developed their accompaniment, the poetry and music could be adjusted together.
The record also needed room for Morrison’s public life as a singer. That became the place for a live “Roadhouse Blues.” Haeny recalled searching the concert tapes used for Absolutely Live, making rough mixes of the available performances and reviewing them with the band. The released version combined recordings from two cities and shortened Morrison’s spoken passage. According to Haeny, the track contained no instrumental or vocal overdubs, though he enhanced the crowd sound.
Other passages connected the poetry with familiar Doors material in different ways. “Newborn Awakening” uses music from “Peace Frog,” while “The Hitchhiker” incorporates dialogue from Morrison’s film HWY: An American Pastoral alongside “Riders on the Storm.” Those choices make the record play like an edited portrait of Morrison’s work across poetry, film and music.
Lisciandro initially questioned whether accompaniment would distract from the poems. He also believed the involvement of the surviving Doors could help the work reach listeners who might never buy a recording of poetry alone. That tension was built into the finished album: Morrison supplied the words and voice, while the surviving collaborators determined how those recordings would unfold.
At the 1980 Grammy Awards, An American Prayer earned Morrison a nomination for Best Spoken Word, Documentary or Drama Recording.
