Elizabeth Cook – Great Television
Today, revered country singer-songwriter Elizabeth Cook announced the release of Great Television, a new studio album exquisitely blending country and rock and roll, produced by Shooter Jennings, and released August 14 via Thirty Tigers.
The Florida-bred, Nashville based singer-songwriter maps the hidden corners of the American experience from both a deeply personal perspective and a place of reflecting on historical events and their ripple effects.
Recorded with Cook’s live band at Sunset Sound in Los Angeles, Great Television features collaborations with country music royalty Wynonna Judd, and marks a commanding new addition to a formidable catalog. Her first new project since 2020’s Aftermath, Cook is on a mission to illuminate the type of lives typically sidelined in the dominant media narrative and the emotional truth buried within long-overlooked histories.
The first single from the album, released today, is the thrilling track, “Razorwire Wall” which finds Turnpike Troubadours’ Evan Felker joining Cook for a hot-blooded love song inspired by dropping her ex-boyfriend off at jail.
“Razorwire Wall is a song about when fierce love finds fierce people. Having a voice like Evan Felker join me is probably gonna cause a lot of fence damage.” shared Cook.
The LP arrives alongside the theatrical release of The Easy Kind (premiered tonight at IFC in NYC) —a narrative film about her life as an artist fundamentally resistant to Nashville music conformity, tracing a turbulent journey that began with singing on bar stages with her parents’ band at just four years old. The film stars Elizabeth alongside David Letterman (playing a version of himself), Karen Allen, Susie Essman, Melissa Jackson and Charles Esten, all playing characters in the semi-fictional version of Elizabeth’s life and directed by Katy Chevigny in her narrative feature debut. The movie will have an Oscar-qualifying run for a week after the initial NYC premiere, with special guests at select screenings for Q&As.
“Katy proposed the idea of having the film be a hybrid, which I thought was genius,” Cook recalls. “It provided me with a protective layer from exposing too much, but allowed me to get my point across and work with actors in a way that was truly creative.”
From unvarnished vignettes of Cook alone at home (snapping green beans, writing songs in her pink legal pads) to snapshots of her onstage life (including a scene at the Grand Ole Opry, where she’s performed over 400 times without ever being inducted as a member), The Easy Kind includes footage from a solo acoustic performance in which her between-song banter offers up candid details of her life story. The result: a riveting look at the complicated reality of sustaining an uncompromised artistic life, at turns poignant and colorful and wildly inspiring.
For more than two decades, Elizabeth Cook has operated outside the machinery of mainstream country while staking her claim as one of American music’s most vital storytellers. Triumphs like 2007’s Balls (a major creative breakthrough featuring her Americana Music Awards-nominated, career-defining anthem “Sometimes It Takes Balls to Be a Woman”), 2010’s Welder (made with legendary producer Don Was and selected for Rolling Stone’s list of the year’s best albums), and 2016’s Billboard-charting Exodus of Venus (one of several of Cook’s LPs glowingly reviewed by seminal rock critic Robert Christgau).
In the making of her latest body of work, Cook expanded on the novelistic sensibilities of her past few albums while shaping her songs into exquisitely taut arrangements that hit with immediate impact. “I wanted this album to take everyone on the ride of the American experience, both from a deeply personal perspective and from a place of reflecting on historical events and their ripple effects,” says Cook. “It felt important to make the songs very concise and digestible, but with a lot of layers to dig into if you want to really dive in. There’s a lot of code in these lyrics.”
Great Television takes its title from its luminous opening track “Sunset Promenade”—“Turns out hurricanes are great television” and the album cover utilizes a painterly photograph of a nationally televised football game at her alma mater of Georgia Southern University in 1989, when the team stormed to victory despite playing in the midst of a category 4 hurricane. In an era when much of modern life is filtered through screens, the LP gestures toward the psychic dangers of media saturation and hints at Cook’s own uneasy relationship with fame including a 2011 appearance on the Late Show with David Letterman that vaulted her into the national spotlight and led to an ill-fated sitcom deal with CBS.
“To me Great Television speaks to how we’re so consumed by media, enriched and manipulated by it at the same time,” she says. “When I look back on the first time I was on the Late Show, it completely changed my world in ways that became a huge distraction from my music. The whole experience made me realize how the media can interfere with your life and what you’re meant to do.”
Great Television locks into a full-tilt momentum with “Girls of Atomic City,” the first in a series of songs illuminating the type of lives typically sidelined in the dominant media narrative. Another track that unearths the emotional truth buried within long-overlooked histories, “Thiokol Tripwire” embodies a heavy-hearted intensity as Cook recounts the story of a 1971 explosion at a Georgia chemical plant. “The plant was making tripwires for the Vietnam War, and it was the only place in the area that would hire Black women,” she explains. “It was a very dangerous job, but it gave those women an opportunity in a town that wouldn’t hire them anywhere else, and represented real economic progress for their community. And then when the explosion happened, it was mostly Black women who lost their lives.”
Taken together, Great Television and The Easy Kind reaffirm the extraordinary legacy Cook has forged by following her own vision wherever it leads and whether excavating forgotten histories or reflecting on her own life, Cook remains devoted to uncovering the humanity beneath the surface of every tale she tells. “I’m always trying to serve a bigger story than my own,” she says. “But it’s always a thin veil—it’s all autobiographical on some level, or I wouldn’t be driven to do it. For me that’s the best of both worlds: getting to express my truth, while also sharing someone else’s story.”
#elizabethcookforsheriff