An American Prayer isn’t exactly a Doors record. It’s an album of Morrison reading his poetry, recorded in 1969 and 1970. The remaining Doors reunited in 1978 to record a bunch of music behind the left-behind recordings. For the most part, it’s a totally different listening experience than the other Doors releases, though there are Doors songs, and musical references to Doors songs, throughout. Even though Morrison occasionally delivered lyrics like this amongst Doors music, a sustained album of poetry is kind of its own thing. As an entity in the Doors’ overall narrative, An American Prayer was controversial. Some argued that Morrison’s work should have been left untouched, and that the remaining trio didn’t represent the material in the way Morrison had intended. This might be a cynical interpretation, but: Over the decades, it was easy to be suspicious of Manzarek, who had a tendency to rely on every last strain of Morrison’s work and legacy to, I don’t know, give himself something to do? You could look at this as the Doors milking Morrison’s work after his death. But whatever the intentions or circumstances were behind An American Prayer, it gave diehard fans another document of Morrison’s work. It’s more related to the essence of the Doors than either Other Voices or Full Circle, making it a more worthwhile thing to explore beyond the original six albums.