Photos: Elizabeth Cook to Release GREAT TELEVISION, Perform on CBS Saturday Morning
The film The Easy Kind, inspired by Cook's life and directed by Katy Chevigny, is also out now.
Elizabeth Cook has released Great Television, a new studio album blending country and rock & roll via Thirty Tigers. The focus track, THE EASY KIND, features a collaboration with Wynonna Judd. Cook is set to perform on CBS SATURDAY MORNING's Saturday Sessions.
Photo Credit: Aubrey Wise | High res
The album's focus track, 'The Easy Kind' features country legend Wynonna Judd, on working with Judd and the track, Elizabeth stated, 'Wynonna's friendship fell out of some sort of country music sacred sky. I am so blessed to know her and that she has generously shared her talent with me. Wynonna is an icon, a power house and a bleeding heart all in one. Her voice is from a place so rich and raw we are lucky to live in her lifetime.'
Recorded with Cook's live band at Sunset Sound in Los Angeles, Great Television marks a commanding new addition to a formidable catalog. The Florida-bred, Nashville based singer-songwriter's first new project since 2020's Aftermath, the album finds Cook 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. Cook maps the hidden corners of the American experience from both a deeply personal perspective and a perspective of reflection on historical events and their ripple effects.
The LP arrives alongside the theatrical release of The Easy Kind—a narrative film inspired by Cook's life as an artist who has long resisted Nashville convention. Starring Elizabeth alongside David Letterman, Karen Allen, Susie Essman, Melissa Jackson, and Charles Esten, the film blends fact and fiction to trace her remarkable journey from singing in her parents' band at age four to performing at the Grand Ole Opry more than 400 times. Directed by Katy Chevigny, The Easy Kind offers an intimate portrait of Cook's uncompromising artistic life through candid home moments, live performances, and deeply personal storytelling.
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 have cemented her reputation.
Sunset Promenade serves as the album's title track and contains the potent lyric: 'Turns out hurricanes are great television / Turns out all the things in my head are a prison / And I just want a friend I can stand and do my time with.' In an era when much of modern life is filtered through screens, that lyric, along with the LP's title and cover art—which features a painterly photograph of a nationally televised football game at her alma mater, Georgia Southern University, in 1989, when the team stormed to victory while playing through a Category 4 hurricane—gestures toward the psychic dangers of media saturation.
The imagery also reflects Cook's own uneasy relationship with fame, from her 2011 appearance on The Late Show with David Letterman, which propelled her into the national spotlight, to an ultimately ill-fated sitcom development 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 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. 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.'
Tracklist
1 - Sunset Promenade
2 - Girls of Atomic City
3 - Thiokol Tripwire
4 - Okeechobee Mud
5 - Razorwire Wall
6 - The Easy Kind
7 - Caldonia & The Love Convoy
8 - In Your Veins
9 - 19th Nervous Breakdown
10 - Feverfew
11 - Lightly
Upcoming Shows
Oct 4 Sun - Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival, San Francisco CA
Oct 9 Fri - Pelham, TN - CaveFest 2026
The album's release coincides with the digital debut of THE EASY KIND, a narrative film inspired by Cook's life and directed by Katy Chevigny, starring Elizabeth Cook alongside David Letterman, Karen Allen, Susie Essman, Melissa Jackson, and Charles Esten.
Photo Credit: Aubrey Wise | High res
