The Whiskey Priest is songwriter and musician Seth Woods. Based out of Albuquerque since 2011, Seth came to the Land of Enchantment by way of Austin, TX where he played in multiple bands for just shy of a decade. During those years in the Austin music world, Seth found a spirit of musical community and DIY enthusiasm. Around 2005, when his own band Sad Accordions was preparing to record their first album, the group began to write more as a collective. What was once mainly a vehicle for Seth’s original songs became a more collaborative effort, a move that was crucial for the creative evolution of the band, but which left Seth himself with volumes of homeless songs. This is where The Whiskey Priest was born.

Aided by good friend and fellow Austin musician Alex Dupree, Seth began working on the first Whiskey Priest recordings in May of 2006. Gathering with a small group of friends in a downtown church attic, they recorded a handful of songs to Alex's four-track tape machine. These became the beginnings of Wave and Cloud, a record that would finally see its completion in 2009, and its eventual release in 2010 on the UK indie Rainboot (Label). A month-long tour through the UK followed during the fall of 2011 in support of the forthcoming Rainboot (Label) release of his Lost Wages EP. Seth and the band played in and around London, Cardiff, Swansea, Newport, Bristol, Edinburgh, Inverness, Hebden Bridge, and York, as well as radio sessions for Imperial College in London, and Spark FM in Sunderland.

In 2014, The Whiskey Priest’s Mean Spirit was released. Produced by Roberto Sanchez (drummer for longtime Austin mainstays Milton Mapes/Monahans) and mixed at Cacophony Recorders by the ubiquitous Erik Wofford, the album marked a departure from the lo-fi sound of the previous recordings, in favor of a more fully fleshed out body of work, sonically and conceptually.

In 2017 Seth began working on the follow up to Mean Spirit, again with Alex Dupree as co-producer. Alex, who had spent the past few years in Los Angeles, brought drummer Parker Law (Dawn and Dupree/The Undercover Dream Lovers/Drinker) into the fold, whose natural musicality and rhythmic talent would be an invaluable addition to the songs. Working together at John Michael Landon’s Estuary Recording in Austin over New Year’s in 2018, as well as back home in Albuquerque at The Casita, the songs began to depart drastically from the safe realm of a guitar-playing songwriter into new arenas of keyboards, synths, samplers, and triggered sounds. The goal became to keep any and all guitars off to the side, for sonic textures only, and let these other elements carry the weight of the songs.

2020 rolled around and of course slowed the progress considerably, but also allowed for some exciting long distance collaboration. Chris Simpson (Mineral/The Gloria Record/Mountain Time) and Aisha Burns (Julien Baker/Balmorhea/Thor & Friends) lent their voices to the track “The Lotus,” and Emily Cross, lead singer of Sub Pop band Loma, shares the lead vocals with Seth on “The Last Word.” The album, now titled Grief & Praise, was finished and mixed in the fall of 2021 at Estuary.

Broadly, these songs are wrapped up in the dual world of love and loss. As the author Martín Prechtel writes, “Grief is praise of those we have lost. Our own souls who have loved and are now heartbroken would turn to stone and hate us if we did not show such praise.” Specifically, these songs take place and are rooted in the American South West: Big Bend and the Rio Grande, The Sandia Mountains, Taos Mesa, the South Valley of Albuquerque. Grief & Praise represents a decade of living in New Mexico, a decade of love received and friends lost, long drives and quiet nights, soaked through with beauty and heartache and sung back out to the world. 

Alongside Seth's work as The Whiskey Priest and in Sad Accordions, he was a constant member in Chris Simpson’s Zookeeper and Alex Dupree's Trapdoor Band, was a touring member of Zykos, as well as an early collaborator in front man Michael Booher’s eponymous solo project Booher, and has proudly been a longstanding member of the legendary Austin band SWISS.