Elizabeth Cook
Midway through Elizabeth Cook’s new album Great Television, out Friday via Thirty Tigers, the proudly rocking and twanging singer-songwriter nods to four artists who’ve been maligned by both the media and the music industry. Three are superstars Whitney Houston, Britney Spears and Courtney Love; the fourth is Mindy McCready, the country singer who earned a string of hits at the very start of her career in the 1990s and would go on to battle her demons in the public eye until her death in 2013.
“I feel you Mindy, you’re now gone above,” Cook sings in “The Easy Kind,” an anthemic song featured on Great Television. “There’s Whitney and Britney and Courtney Love / There’s nothing like being misunderstood / When people want bad, they don’t mind using good.”
The song, whose album version features Wynonna Judd, is an ode to so-called “difficult women.” It’s a reflection on the fickleness of fame — and how the music industry mines artists for capital and content only to cast them aside in their most vulnerable moments.
“It’s, unfortunately, a bit of a thing with women — especially in the music business — and women that come to a tragic end or tragic status,” Cook tells the Scene. “These women were layered and nuanced, and also bleeding hearts and [in] an immense amount of pain. I think that it’s kind of testament to a fault with society that there’s not a little bit more grace and compassion given.”
The singer explores her own tenuous relationship with fame, as well as the impact of media saturation on all of us, throughout the Shooter Jennings-produced project. Cook is all too familiar with being thrust into the national spotlight. Though she was already a staple of Nashville’s alt-country scene at the time, a 2011 interview on The Late Show With David Letterman put the Florida-born artist on Hollywood’s radar, leading to an ill-fated development deal for a CBS sitcom.
“It was validating in that a lot of people saw a lot of potential in me,” Cook says of the aftermath of her appearance with Letterman, who’s still a close friend. “But it was really challenging to try and mine out of that what I was supposed to do. I felt a little bit like I was chasing fool’s gold. I knew I had music and writing in my back pocket, and the payoff for success in that world was just too big for me to not explore if you consider where I come from — what I come from. To be able to help my family and have more security was something that I felt a responsibility to do.”
The stirring “Okeechobee Mud” aches with a longing for home and recalls fellow Floridian Tom Petty’s opus “Southern Accents.” “Razorwire Wall,” a scorching collaboration with Turnpike Troubadours’ Evan Felker, was written about dropping her ex-boyfriend off at jail. Great Television is a reminder that Cook has long been, and remains, one of country music’s greatest storytellers.
Some of the album’s most striking songs explore forgotten or underreported stories. “Girls of Atomic City” is about the women who moved to Oak Ridge, Tenn., in the early 1940s to unknowingly work on the Manhattan Project. Meanwhile, “Thiokol Tripwire” recounts a 1971 explosion at the Woodbine Thiokol chemical plant in Camden County, Ga., one of the worst industrial disasters in U.S. history. The plant produced trip flares for use in the Vietnam War, and it employed primarily Black women, providing a steady source of income that was severely lacking in the region.
“People in that area would not hire women to work — and specifically would not hire Black women,” Cook explains. “There was only really a paper mill [or] sawmill. That was the only gig in town. [Woodbine Thiokol] hired a lot of Black women, and that really gave them an income and a way to support their families and improve their lives that they hadn’t had access to. … Much like the atomic bomb, it wasn’t without great cost.”
The album is being released as Cook once again steps under a brighter spotlight. The Easy Kind, a narrative film starring Cook as a semi-fictionalized version of herself, recently screened at the IFC Center in New York and at the Belcourt. The film was also an official selection in the Tennessee program at the 2025 Nashville Film Festival. As part of the production, director Katy Chevigny filmed footage of Cook over the course of eight years.
“She lived for a while in East Nashville and became interested in the music community,” Cook says of Chevigny. “She was there right when Todd [Snider] and I — and Chuck Mead and [Gillian Welch and David Rawlings] — had really been pushing along in our careers.”
Chevigny first became interested in making a film about the singer after seeing her perform at The 5 Spot during the lead-up to the release of Cook’s 2016 album Exodus of Venus.
“I stalled her, because I thought, ‘Oh my God, what a horrible idea to make a documentary about this mess — it’ll be used against me,’” says Cook. “But, eventually, I did agree to meet with her, and something just drew me to keep exploring it with her. I agreed to let a documentary crew start following me to little things I was doing, like the Opry, or a rehearsal or a gig around town.”
The film premiered at the Telluride Film Festival in 2024 and, though she’s incredibly proud of the project, Cook says she was initially “absolutely mortified” at thought of the film screening.
“I hid out that whole week,” she says. “[There were] like 1,000 people or something … not a lot. And the other people are literally Will Ferrell, Martha Stewart, Angelina Jolie and Hillary Clinton. That’s who’s hanging around.”
In a full-circle moment, Cook’s old pal Letterman even makes an appearance as himself in the film, which has earned praise from viewers and critics who’ve caught screenings around the country.
“It’s gotten easier the more people that see it and respond favorably to it. But it’s still kind of a scary thing every time.”
