Elizabeth Cook Remembers Todd Snider, Finds Strength on New Album

Before Elizabeth Cook can discuss her new album Great Television, she wants to make sure you know how to pronounce “Sunset Promenade,” the leadoff track.

“It’s ‘Sunset Promen-ADE,’” Cook says. “It rhymes with lemonade. You don’t take your partner and promen-odd, when you’re square dancing. You take them and you promen-ade.”

Now that that’s off her chest, the singer-songwriter, SiriusXM Outlaw Country host, and close friend to the late Todd Snider is willing to talk about Great Television, her eighth studio album and first since 2020’s Aftermath. “My happy place is just being in a spot where I can create,” Cook tells Rolling Stone. She’s sitting on a rooftop patio on Manhattan’s Upper West Side in early June, during downtime from the IFC premiere run for The Easy Kind, a docudrama based on Cook’s life, in which she appears as herself.

Great Television is a companion to the film, she says. The 11-track LP was produced by Shooter Jennings and features collaborations with Wynonna Judd and Turnpike Troubadours frontman Evan Felker. It’s an album heavy on advocacy, particularly for aspiring female artists — a non-negotiable conviction that Cook has worn on her sleeve for the better part of her 27-year career.

“It’s the only reason to put anything out,” she says. “There’s a part of me that wants to be sort of selfish with art, because I am not the type that is validated or enjoys the attention, the stage or any of that. Some artists really thrive on that. They love it, and I don’t have that. It’s, hopefully, a service and part of the calling — what you give back when you receive a gift.”

Great Television rarely strays too far from these principles. Once you commit the last syllable of “Sunset Promenade” to memory, it reveals itself to be an ode of sorts to a series of women in Cook’s life. Two are fellow artists — Ashley Monroe and Chelle Rose — and the third is a niece who grew up similar to Cook, “born into white trash central Florida,” she says. The song leads off with voicemails Cook saved from the women and plays out in three parts — one verse for each. When Cook sings, “Turns out all the things in my head are a prison/I just want a friend I can stand to do my time with,” her voice nearly cracks.

“I’d been coming out of a breakup,” she says of writing the song. “These last 15, 20 years of my life, I’ve really become familiar with loss and isolation and those types of things. But I have a core group of people who are really close, and I wanted to write a love song to them.”

Cook recorded the album at Sunset Sound Studio 3 in Los Angeles, where Jennings holds an exclusive lease and does the bulk of his production work. Jennings, like Cook, hosts a show on SiriusXM, and the two have a decades-long rapport. When they had the idea to turn “Razorwire Wall” into a duet, Jennings immediately thought of Felker and, with Turnpike already recording in Sunset Sound, had him cut vocals for Cook’s song.

“I’m a huge fan of Evan’s work,” Cook says. “I just think he is like some sort of Larry McMurtry poet at a really high level, and his voice is really singular in that band and what they’ve built. And they work with Shooter, too, so a dream collided with a logistic opportunity.”

If Felker’s appearance was by happenstance, Wynonna’s was by design. When Cook recorded “The Easy Kind,” she immediately thought of her longtime friend. The song, written a decade ago, echoes the film of the same name, and goes back in time to a low period in Cook’s life. After Judd recorded her part, Cook struggled to listen to the song all the way through.

“It came after I got shipped off to rehab a long time ago,” she says of writing “The Easy Kind,” “after going through a series of insane traumas in a really condensed point in time, and it just kind of blew my head up. I was not well. People around me were worried, and it was fair that they were worried. But the clinic they sent me off to was another trauma. In that experience, though, what I gained from it was that I had to pick myself up to survive, because I was gonna die. I was under a hundred pounds. They were starving me and accusing me of throwing up my food, and I wasn’t. I was really hungry all the time.

“I had to find a life force at a really weak and vulnerable moment when everybody was ganged up on me,” she continues. “That was a thing that needed to happen. I found out how strong I could be.”

Throughout Cook’s career, she’s directed the bulk of that strength to lifting up other women. It has been nearly 20 years since Cook recorded “Sometimes It Takes Balls to Be a Woman,” but it’s a song that became a North Star for a generation of female artists. She recalls Kaitlin Butts telling her about all the money in tips she made playing the song in bars. One night, at the Grand Ole Opry, Cook confided in Loretta Lynn that she thought the song would be buried by the Nashville machine because it had the word “balls” in the title. Lynn shot back, “Honey, I had nine songs banned from country radio.”

Today, Cook recognizes and applauds the fearless songwriting and stage presence of artists like Butts, Ella Langley, and Willow Avalon, but stops short of proclaiming it a renaissance. Cook has seen it before.

“I remember the time in the Nineties when females were dominating the charts — Shania, Faith, there was an era of that. It has happened in chapters before, and hopefully it’s more sustained,” she says. “But I’ll tell you what, the level of good you gotta be to get that is remarkable. You gotta outwrite, outsing, outperform, outdress, outplay — by tenfold — a male counterpoint.”

“My support of female artists is because I am in love with their work,” Cook adds. “I’m in love with what they’re doing, and I want to elevate it.”

Great Television serves as Cook’s outlet for all those feelings. It’s as complete of an album as she has ever recorded, but it’s also the most personal. Still, all the traumas that informed the album pale in comparison to losing Snider in November 2025.

His death, at 59 from complications of pneumonia, was the unkindest cut of all to Cook, who now finds herself releasing a record without her friend in her life. For all Cook has meant to the artists who have come after her, Snider was her sounding board. They had sidebar emails. They had “summits” — Cook’s word for visits with Snider where they talked about music, life, or both.

Cook is reluctant to see herself as the role model she has become in the industry, but she has no such issue regarding Snider as a visionary, or offering advice on how artists and fans alike can continue to learn from him.

“Study him,” Cook says. “Study every phrase. Study every verse. Study every album cut. Learn it from the beginning to the end. Read his articles — often he wrote his own press. Really take into your approach his lifestyle, his mantras, his approach to everything and how he would see the world.”

Cook says she misses Snider every day. She also admits he wasn’t perfect.

“He was flawed. He had his own struggles with everything, and that showed,” she says. “But he never backed down from the reality of it all. I think how he approaches the world can help us re-invent things that need re-inventing.”

Josh Crutchmer is a journalist and author whose upcoming book, Sonoran Sounds, is set for release in March 2027 via Back Lounge Publishing.