Revered country singer-songwriter Elizabeth Cook has released a new single, ‘Sunset Promenade,’ a stunning country song with rocking guitars and enrapturing strings. The song inspired the title of her forthcoming album, Great Television. The new studio album, which promises a collision of country and rock & roll, was produced by Shooter Jennings and will be released on August 14 via Thirty Tigers. Watch the marvelous VHS-era-inspired music video, which boasts a glitching Elizabeth and a TV-headed backing band, HERE.
The song’s chorus features 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 the 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.”
Speaking exclusively to American Songwriter, Cook added, “The first verse is about Ashley Monroe, the second verse is about Shelly Rose, and the third verse is about my niece, who [I grew up with],” she said. “It’s just a love a love song for them with the overriding idea that we’re also isolated in our media bubbles. I feel like It connects us, but it also divides us and it can be pretty manipulative.”
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. 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. Watch the trailer HERE.
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.
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.”
ALBUM 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
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