Elizabeth Cook has never been the type to color inside Nashville’s lines, and her latest chapter proves she has no intention of starting now. The revered country singer-songwriter is rolling into what her camp is (rightfully) calling the “Summer of Elizabeth Cook,” anchored by a new studio album, Great Television, out August 14 via Thirty Tigers, and a genre-bending narrative feature film, The Easy Kind, currently making its way across the country following its NYC premiere at the IFC Center.

Produced by Shooter Jennings and recorded with Cook’s live band at Sunset Sound in Los Angeles, Great Television is her first new project since 2020’s Aftermath and marks a striking evolution in a catalog that already includes career-defining records like Balls (2007), Welder (2010), and Exodus of Venus (2016). The eleven-track album features country music royalty Wynonna Judd, Turnpike Troubadours’ Evan Felker, and a songwriter operating at the peak of her storytelling powers.

“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,” Cook says. “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.”

The album’s lead single, “Razorwire Wall,” is a hot-blooded love song inspired, delightfully, by dropping an ex-boyfriend off at jail. Evan Felker joins Cook on vocals for a duet that hits like the best kind of trouble. “Razorwire Wall is a song about when fierce love finds fierce people,” Cook shared. “Having a voice like Evan Felker join me is probably gonna cause a lot of fence damage.” The track has already racked up early praise from Rolling Stone, CMT, Holler, The Bluegrass Situation, Women of Americana, and Ditty TV.

Stream “Razorwire Wall” and dig into Elizabeth Cook’s catalog on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/0dyEUZv8ftA0dzL5vb2Y9s

Watch the official music video for “Razorwire Wall” here: https://youtu.be/ILnCJRNhUXs

Great Television takes its title from its opening track “Sunset Promenade” (“Turns out hurricanes are great television”), and its cover pulls from a painterly photograph of a nationally televised 1989 Georgia Southern University football game played through a category 4 hurricane. It’s a fitting visual metaphor for an album interrogating our media-saturated moment, including Cook’s own uneasy relationship with fame following her 2011 Late Show with David Letterman appearance, which vaulted her into the national spotlight and led to an ill-fated CBS sitcom deal.

“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.”

Elsewhere on the record, Cook trains her lens on lives typically sidelined by the dominant narrative. “Girls of Atomic City” and “Thiokol Tripwire” — the latter recounting a 1971 explosion at a Georgia chemical plant that killed mostly Black women workers making tripwires for the Vietnam War — showcase her novelistic instincts and her commitment to excavating overlooked American histories.

Arriving alongside the album is The Easy Kind, a narrative feature film directed by Katy Chevigny in her narrative debut. Stylistically closer to Purple Rain or Curb Your Enthusiasm than any conventional music biopic, the movie stars Cook as a semi-fictional version of herself alongside David Letterman (also playing himself), Karen Allen, Susie Essman, Melissa Jackson, and Charles Esten. Following its NYC premiere, the film is on an Oscar-qualifying run with Q&As at select screenings — including an upcoming stop at Chicago’s Alamo Drafthouse Cinema.

“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 home vignettes (snapping green beans, writing songs in pink legal pads) to a scene at the Grand Ole Opry (where she’s performed over 400 times without ever being inducted as a member), The Easy Kind is a riveting look at what it actually costs to sustain an uncompromised artistic life.

Great Television 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

Pre-save Great Television ahead of its August 14 release, catch The Easy Kind on its theatrical run, and consider this your official invitation to the Summer of Elizabeth Cook.