Elizabeth Cook Wrote the Manhattan Project Into an Album

Elizabeth Cook performing.

Most country records about American history reach for the Civil War or the Dust Bowl. Great Television reaches for the Manhattan Project and a chemical plant in Georgia. Elizabeth Cook has spent six years away from albums, and the one she has come back with treats twentieth-century industrial disaster as legitimate material for a three-minute song.

The record arrived on 14 August through Thirty Tigers. Shooter Jennings produced it at Sunset Sound in Los Angeles, and Cook cut it with the band she tours with rather than hiring a room of session players. That decision is audible: the guitars are loud, the takes sound like performances, and the album moves at the pace of a group that already knows the arrangements.

Six Years Away, and a Band That Was Already Working

It is Cook’s eighth studio album and her first since Aftermath in 2020. The gap is long enough that the natural move would have been a careful, produced comeback. She did the opposite. Country Standard Time credits Andrew Leahey on guitars, John Venezia on drums and Phil Anthony on bass, and singles out Leahey’s playing as the aggressive edge running under the songs.

Using a road band on a record after a long absence is a practical choice more than a romantic one. The players have the material in their hands already, which shortens the sessions and removes the negotiation that happens when a producer’s regulars meet an artist’s songs for the first time. Jennings, who has built a production career on exactly this kind of setup, let the arrangement stand.

Sunset Sound matters here too, though not for the reasons a press release would give. It is a room built for bands playing together, with the sightlines and isolation that assumes, and it rewards groups that arrive rehearsed. Booking it for a band that has been playing these songs on the road is a different proposition from booking it to assemble an album piece by piece. The record sounds like the former.

The Song About the Women Who Built the Bomb

“Girls of Atomic City” is the album’s clearest statement of method. It takes the women employed on the Manhattan Project — workers who largely did not know what they were building — and writes them as characters rather than as a lesson. The Glide Magazine review notes it blends country writing with rock guitars, which is the correct decision for the subject. A reverent acoustic treatment would have turned it into a museum placard.

What makes the song work is that it does not editorialise about the bomb. The women are the story. That restraint is harder than it looks, and it is the same instinct that keeps the rest of the album from tipping into commentary.

It also solves a problem that has defeated better-funded attempts at the same material. A song about the Manhattan Project invites a verdict, and a verdict is the one thing a three-minute country song cannot carry without collapsing. By writing from inside the workforce — people who clocked in, were told nothing, and found out with everyone else — Cook gets the weight of the subject without having to pass sentence on it.

A 1971 Explosion, Scored With Strings

“Thiokol Tripwire” goes to a 1971 explosion at a chemical plant in Georgia. Both Glide and Country Standard Time describe it as the album’s most cinematic track, carried by strings rather than guitars. Country Standard Time places it in its Vietnam-era context, which is where the plant’s work sat.

Disaster songs are a long tradition in this music — mine collapses, floods, mill fires — and they usually take the form of a ballad written close to the event. Cook is working at fifty-odd years’ distance, which changes the job. The song has to supply the context a contemporary audience would have brought with them, without turning into narration. Strings do some of that work here, setting a scale the guitars would have flattened.

Wynonna Judd and the Duet That Names the Film

“The Easy Kind” is a slow duet with Wynonna Judd, and Country Standard Time reads it as a song about the loss of autonomy both singers have experienced across their careers — a pointed subject for two women who came up inside the Nashville system at different moments. The song lends its title to a theatrical feature released alongside the album, a hybrid documentary directed by Katy Chevigny.

Country Standard Time quotes the duet’s central admission — “I’m not sayin’ it’s noble, not saying it’s right … I got nothin’ to lose” — which is the line the whole arrangement is built to arrive at. Sung by one voice it would be a confession. Sung by two women at different stages of the same career, it becomes something closer to a shared finding.

Elsewhere, Evan Felker of the Turnpike Troubadours sings on “Razorwire Wall”, a rock-leaning song about dropping a lover at jail. “Okeechobee Mud” goes back to Cook’s rural Florida upbringing, and “In Your Veins” handles obsession at close range. “Caldonia and the Love Convoy” runs fast and rambling, and “Lightly” sits at the other end of the register. The guests are used sparingly and each one is doing something the song needs.

The film complicates the release in a useful way. The Easy Kind is a hybrid of documentary and narrative rather than a concert picture, and it carries cameos from David Letterman and Susie Essman — names that signal Cook’s other career as a broadcaster more than her Nashville one. Releasing the two together means the album is not the only entry point, which is a sensible hedge for an artist whose audience has never been concentrated in one place.

What Happens When a Rolling Stones Song Changes Narrator

The album includes a rewrite of “19th Nervous Breakdown” told from the woman’s point of view. Glide’s description — that it lands somewhere near the Monkees covering a 1970s outlaw country song — captures how odd and how enjoyable the result is. Reversing the narrator on a song built entirely around a man’s condescension is not a subtle move, but it is a funny one, and it earns its place by being played straight.

Cook has described the album’s aim plainly. “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,” she said in the announcement of the record. The title comes from a line in the opening track, “Sunset Promenade”: hurricanes, it turns out, are great television.

Why the Record Holds Together

A track list that moves from the Manhattan Project to a Georgia plant explosion to a Florida childhood to a Rolling Stones rewrite should not cohere. It does, because the writing keeps returning to people who were near something large and had no control over it — workers, bystanders, partners, the woman in the Stones song. That is a single subject approached from several directions rather than an anthology.

Glide’s John Moore called Cook one of Nashville’s most distinctive and underrated voices, a verdict that has followed her for most of two decades without changing her commercial position much. Records like this are why the phrase keeps getting used. It is a working songwriter’s album, made quickly with a band that tours, and it is the kind of release that tends to arrive without a marketing push and then stay in rotation for years. The same pattern held for Ray Wylie Hubbard’s late-career run in Austin, made under similar conditions and to similar effect.

Six years is a long absence in a format that rewards constant presence. Cook has come back with the least commercial version of the record she could have made, and it is better for it.