Sometimes It Takes Balls To Be a Woman: Talking ‘The Easy Kind’ With Katy Chevigny and Elizabeth Cook
By I’ve long been a fan of the great Florida-born, Nashville-based singer-songwriter Elizabeth Cook, whose wry and literary take on Country and Western music situates her comfortably between titans like Lucinda Williams and Tom T. Hall. In addition to being a genius songwriter, Cook is a raconteur of the old school, whose Sirius XM radio show Apron Strings is a brilliantly rendered mix of sometimes rambling, often ribald and hilarious anecdotes and perfectly curated playlists featuring the best of left field and outlaw country, both vintage and new. When I heard about The Easy Kind, a new film collaboration between Cook and the celebrated documentarian Katy Chevigny, I was absolutely psyched to see it. But however high my expectations, The Easy Kind surpassed them. As we will discuss at length in the interview below, The Easy Kind turns out to be an innovative hybrid of documentary and narrative film, which taken together is by far one of the best and most authentic meditations of life in the music business I’ve ever seen. Despite her astounding talent, Cook’s rebellious streak has tended to keep her on the margins of Nashville’s mainstream, even while procuring the ardent fandom of everyone from Robert Christgau to David Letterman (the latter of whom plays himself in the movie.) In this interview with Elizabeth Cook and Katy Chevigny, we discuss how this most unusual film was conceptualized and executed, the shadow of aesthetic forerunners like Robert Altman’s Nashville, the overt and more insidiously subtle misogyny purveying the music business, and why, in Elizabeth Cook’s own eternal coinage, “Sometimes, it takes balls to be a woman.”
Take a break, put on one of Elizabeth Cook’s fantastic LPs, and read about one of the truly inspired films of 2026. Then, if you are able, attend one of the screenings of The Easy Kind, where at most stops you will be treated to a Q&A with the filmmaker and star, and maybe even a song or two from Elizabeth Cook.
Elizabeth Nelson: Lemme start by saying that I loved The Easy Kind. I think it’s a real achievement and just an extraordinary film. I think it’s one of the best and truest accounts of the music industry that I’ve seen. So, I would love it if you guys would give me a short background on the origins of the film, how the two of you met and how you ended up deciding to work together?
Katy Chevigny: Sure. Shall I start, Elizabeth?
Elizabeth Cook: Yeah, I feel like you’ve always got a good spiel on that.
Katy: Yeah. So, I’m a native New Yorker. I grew up in New York City and I moved to Nashville with my family in 2015. It was really different from the cities I’d lived in which were predominantly New York and Chicago. I was totally struck with how totally cool the movie and music scene is in Nashville and how very different from what I’d experienced. I don’t mean to diss my New York people but, they think they know everything about culture. And in Nashville, it was so obvious to me that this was a completely invented bias. I got to Nashville, and I was like, “This music scene is so much more interesting and varied and profound, and people are more talented and this is unbelievable.” It was so cool, and I immediately got excited about making a movie about what I was seeing in the Nashville scene. It’s visually fascinating and socially and economically textured in such a specific way. I knew I had to make my Nashville film. But what film?
Then several people in Nashville had mentioned Elizabeth Cook who’s very well known in Nashville, and in fact a lot of people listen to her radio show. So, I knew her name, people had mentioned her and then Elizabeth started performing at the 5 Spot, which is like a groovy dive bar in East Nashville. She was doing a so-called residency. I don’t know if there were air quotes on it or not, but she was workshopping a new album which is now two albums ago. She was playing there on Wednesday nights at 6 p.m. and you could pay $5 to the door and hear her and her band workshop her new material.
It was like an ultra-casual groovy, in the know, kind of scene. I could sit there with a beer and watch Elizabeth get up onto the microphone and say, “I’ve got a new song, I’ve really never performed this live, I’d like to see what you all think.” I was just like, “This is maybe the coolest thing I’ve ever experienced in my entire life.” I thought she was so unbelievable, and she was like, this far away from me. So, then I was really like maybe I’d make a move. How is this incredibly talented woman here workshopping stuff? How do I make a movie about this? Not even knowing what the movie was.
So that was the seed of it and then I spent a long time courting her and her manager to see if I could get in the door.
Elizabeth N: That’s so cool. What a great origin story. Elizabeth, is that how you remember this? Your manager said, “Hey, there’s this filmmaker who wants to work with you?”
Elizabeth C: Yeah, I do remember it. So, I think that it went—well, I learned later that Katy had been emailing my management, and I don’t know if they weren’t responsive or they were just putting her off. But eventually at some point an email from her got filtered through to me. I saw, “Oh, it’s a documentary filmmaker. She wants to talk about making a documentary film.” My first reaction was, “Oh God, no.” But I had some intuition, and I agreed to meet with her, and she came over to the house and, of course, I looked her up and saw that she was a pretty hefty filmmaker in the documentary world. I was pretty reluctant and hesitant at first just because I was concerned about being that vulnerable.
But then over time the more I talked to her, and I really liked her and just thought it felt like we would sort of be creating together in a way. So, she agreed to let her start following me with a small crew just on some of my normal showbiz life. Like going and playing the Opry or going to a rehearsal or playing a hometown show, these types of things. So, she started gathering all that documentary footage. Then as time went, the trust built, the vision built and it was all very fluid and in real time over a long period of time.
Elizabeth N: So, The Easy Kind started as a documentary and then evolved into a scripted narrative film, with some of the original documentary footage included, which I thought was an audacious approach to filmmaking. I think in many ways it mirrors the risk-taking that is inherent in Elizabeth’s approach to her songwriting and her career. Can you talk to me a little bit about how you arrived at the decision to make this hybrid film and how it evolved from documentary into scripted?
Katy: Sure. Yeah, it was gradual and organic. I did not set out to make a fictional film. Eventually, I just realized that I couldn’t figure out how to tell the story I wanted to tell regarding Elizabeth through traditional documentary form. Much as I tried, the straight documentary format seemed somehow not to contain her. I can’t quite describe it, but something more than that seemed required in order to render her in her fullness.
Elizabeth’s very warm and hospitable and even though she was nervous about having a documentary crew she didn’t let on to me about that, initially. She was completely professional, polite and friendly. Then when we were done filming, whatever scene we were filming and the cameras went off, she would get warmer and more hospitable. When we were filming in her house sometimes, she’d say, “Well, Katy, do you want a glass of wine or I’m cooking some potatoes, do you want some potatoes?” So, we would sit and talk and there was a more candid Elizabeth Cook that came out once the cameras were off.
Now, that is very common in documentaries. I’m sure you even experienced just going backstage— you can let your guard down. Among filmmakers we talk about this all the time, but really the best conversations were the ones we were having when the cameras were off. I shared that with some colleagues, and I thought, “Gee, I wish there was some way to tell this story where we could include these off the record conversations, some of which included what I was offering. It was like our back and forth that was kind of—what’s the word—just rich with material that I found interesting so at one point I finally approached Elizabeth and her management team. I wrote up a proposal and I said, “What if we were to make a film that’s a narrative film that’s about not you, but someone very much like you navigating the Nashville music scene? Somebody who’d been working for a long time in the business who’d had love affairs, who was divorced,” but we could talk about all of that. We could talk about the record deals. We could talk about the ex-husband, all the things that you might talk about over a glass of wine, but you might not put in a documentary.” Elizabeth, you want to pick it up from there?
Elizabeth C: Well, yeah, I know when I heard that idea I was like, “Yahtzee.” I was like, “Ding, ding ding, we have a winner.” I was very excited and elated about that idea because it did take the reins off and being able to let it all fly, be even more creative, which is just fun. Then also we’d have a protective layer to the story.
Elizabeth N: Something that struck me about the film when I was watching it and I think was just remarkable because knowing that it evolved from documentary into a narrative scripted film is how consistent, Elizabeth, your performance is throughout it. In some scenes you’re giving these scripted line readings and in others you’re monologuing on stage at actual concerts. There’s no disjunction between EC, the character in the film that you play, and Elizabeth Cook, the one-time documentary subject. So, Katy, did you know, going into this and that Elizabeth was going to be able to give a performance in both contexts in this way? Elizabeth, do you have an acting background? The way you hold the screen is extraordinary.
Katy: I’ll go first. Yeah, I had a hunch. This is the thing I’m proudest of. Maybe you can appreciate this also as an artist. We have intuitions as artists like following your gut or whatever where I was just, “I think this is going to work. I think Elizabeth’s going to be great.” I found her very captivating in the club. Watching her perform, I found her captivating in the documentary footage. I felt like I was watching a star. Then I did have some producers who were helping me raise the financing and they recommended a couple of them who were like, “Okay, she’s obviously compelling in the documentary footage. Do you know if she can act?” I was like, “Well, she has acted and some things.”
We did a test shoot in 2020 during the pandemic. We had a little bit of funding from the Catapult Film Fund who was our first funder. God bless the first funders who take the risk. They’re the risk takers like us, and they gave us a little bit of money, and we did a small shoot with Emily Topper who was our director of photography who was fantastic. Like me, she came from a documentary background but also had a fiction heart. I wrote some scenes that Elizabeth had contributed to and thought about. We cast the scenes with real actors and then also with some other musician non-actors just to get a sense of what worked. The upshot of that shoot was that we were all convinced yes, Elizabeth can act.
The other thing that I became convinced of was, we should hire professional actors to work on the film, that whatever the skill is to make non-actors in a film, I don’t have that skill. I think both Elizabeth and I felt like if we got great actors on stage with her, we all got it.
Elizabeth C: A big factor was Katy’s generosity in letting me help shape the dialogue in the scripted scenes. She would send me a scene with a storyline, the character’s name, what they say. Then she would let me just ravage that with how I would word it. So, I feel like that was really a key to letting the documentary footage flow into the scripted scenes because it was the same voice, the same use of language. That was really key. I just appreciated her faith and the opportunity to do it. I think acting is a lot of fun. It’s just a real sense of like to play in it. I am not a trained thespian and do not have a wide variety of skills in that department that I could pull out, but in terms of being able to play myself especially if I’m able to help shape the dialogue, that was pretty seamless for me to do. So, it was just a lot of fun to get to do it.
Elizabeth N: Another thing I appreciated about the film was that it didn’t really cop out when it comes to the realities of being a middle-class musician, which is what EC, the character, is depicted as. There’s this scene in The Easy Kind where there’s a friend of yours who is lecturing EC about artistic integrity. You come back with, “If I don’t generate more revenue, my retirement will be that I’m living under a bridge.”
Elizabeth C: Right.
Elizabeth N: You needed money to fix a hole in your roof, because water was pouring into your house. I appreciated you guys navigating away from the idea that even if you’re a big name in Nashville, everything is not awesome and amazing, but instead it’s pretty tedious and boring and dull and depressing. I was thrilled that you told an honest story about the economics of contemporary music. Was it hard to stick with that, especially when it’s probably a foregone conclusion that most audiences want to believe all their favorite singer-songwriters are doing great, financially, emotionally, and in every other aspect of their lives?
Katy: Yes. This was an ongoing conversation between me and Elizabeth. We had COVID at that time when we couldn’t film when we really, in retrospect, had a lot of long text and email and phone exchanges about the nature of the movie and the tone of the movie and the flavor of the movie. We didn’t want it to be “gloom and doom,” and “Oh, how tragic because it’s hard to pay my bills.” Elizabeth often said to me, “I have a great life. I have such an incredibly cool life. I’m grateful for it.”
That needed to be in the movie too. I took that to heart because I could have moments of course, I was bringing my own experience as a middle-class filmmaker to it where I was like there’s just days where you just want to complain, complain, complain about how hard it is to get something made. That’s also not dramatic storytelling. So, we were trying to, I think, strike a balance, but at the same time be realistic. So, both these things can be true. You have a great fascinating life. It’s also really hard financially and sometimes emotionally and spiritually, etcetera. So how do we talk about both those things in a way that is believable? That was one of the things we were striving for.
Elizabeth C: Yeah, just that both things can be true, that fame doesn’t necessarily equal fortune, and that honestly, as I got deeper into the business and made friends with people that I consider at the peak of success that are friends of mine, they have just a different set of struggles. It’s not without struggle. It’s like, no matter how you skin it, it’s hard, being in the creative arts is hard—I don’t think it’s easy for anybody that does it. So, learning that really gave me a lot of perspective and then my really good friend Todd Snider, pointed out that we don’t complain; we’re living the dream. Like, we are artistically uncompromised which is hard to achieve and be able to make a living doing it.
I don’t know very many, especially in this day and age that don’t have to compromise artistically and get to have the peak of everything as well. I think that in that scene you mentioned with my friend Charlie [played by actor Donal Brophy] it’s like I didn’t have to compromise artistically but I may have to compromise in some business, social business framework because of my gender more so. So that was the point that I feel like was also trying to make. It’s just saying, “Well yeah, I get all this and this. I’m in this club because I live with great authenticity and great autonomy. However, because of being a female, particularly, there’s a little bit more edge to what I have to curve to maybe than some of my male counterparts.
Elizabeth N: There’s just so many stories about this, but at one point in the film you invoked the name of Saint Lucinda Williams. I’m sure you’ve read her memoir—she’s got nothing but stories, great ones. There’s a story that she tells about recording with Steve Earle. She has a certain level of perfectionism that she wants on this recording and she’s doing multiple vocal takes, and she wants it to sound a certain way, and Steve Earle is getting very frustrated with her, and he feels like he’s got the usable take, but she wants to keep going. She says something like, “If Bruce Springsteen wanted to do 300 vocal takes, you’d think he was a genius. You think I’m just a crazy bitch because I want to get my vocals right.” How do you navigate around these frustrations and how that can be challenging in your life and your work?
Elizabeth C: Yeah. Well, I think in order for me to maintain my platform and hopefully grow it, I can’t lead with anger or frustration over that. I recognize that it exists, I recognize that I have to navigate it, I recognize that it’s unfair, maybe that I have to navigate it, but I can’t let that emotion or the idea of it not being fair take over.
Elizabeth N: Right.
Elizabeth C: Because it’s just too big of a distraction and too big of a… Yeah, I definitely went through years after, for reasons that weren’t just related to being a woman but just related to the music business in general of being really emotionally in the weeds about being done wrong and victim mentality and that kind of thing. It just doesn’t serve me. Doesn’t mean that it’s not true, doesn’t mean that it’s not completely unfair but I can’t let it dominate me because it’s too distracting. I think the more that I can just focus on doing good work, and the more that I can grow that, the more I do to counterbalance it in the end. I don’t counterbalance it by bitching about it. That’s not going to work ever. I feel like I counterbalance it by gaining more power, by doing better work even if it’s unfair, that I have to be ten times better than the male counterpart.
Elizabeth N: I know about the ten times thing. It’s awful.
Elizabeth C: That’s how I strengthen my voice and fight against that idea. It’s just relying on the women that have come before me, Lucinda, Loretta, Dolly. Dolly knows exactly what she’s doing. She walks into a room tits first. I believe that’s by design. Truly, she knows exactly what she’s doing, but backs all that up by just being an incredible songwriter, an incredible musician, an incredible performer, an incredible entrepreneur. So, I just look at it that way. I don’t know if that really answers that, but that’s my mindset about it.
Elizabeth N: Katy, same question. You’re a woman in a field that is largely unfair to women filmmakers. I’m not a filmmaker, but I have to imagine you confront the same shit that a musician would. Maybe something even worse.
Katy: Yeah. There’s not a lot of women directors and there’s also not a lot of movies about women protagonists. So, I’m a woman making a movie about a woman who’s a woman. I also just leaned into it. I felt like if not now when, and let’s talk about it. For me, it was very satisfying. I do feel there was an amazing thing where Elizabeth Cook, the actor, got vulnerable about the difficulties of being an artist and was able to put her personal experience into this character.
It also gave me permission to put into the script and the film in general, my feelings of frustration. You do, sometimes, your voice does crack when you talk to your friends because you’re frustrated but also you don’t want that to destroy the friendship. You don’t want that to be the only thing about you. I think one of the things, and Elizabeth and I talked about this a lot too, was how much do we make that part of the movie. How much do we make that in the plot and how much is it subtext, and we leaned into subtext.
There’s a scene, it’s very subtle, I’m not even sure everybody gets it, but there’s the scene where EC is in the makeup room getting her makeup on before going to do a little show. Then she walks through a hallway and it’s like a little gauntlet of guys whistling and looking at her and her manager’s shaking her head. We just left it at that and that scene sort of to stand in for all the daily humiliations of being looked at and assessed. You’ve got to just keep on going. You can’t even stop and let it bother you. That’s just not productive. So, that’s almost like you can either pick that up or not pick that up and you can choose your own adventure in watching the movie.
Elizabeth N: Beautiful scene.
Katy: AndI do think you know subtlety is our friend in all of this. We’re not trying to hit people over the head with the idea that misogyny is suboptimal. But I think there’s a lot of women who acted in this movie who when they saw it, they were like, “Oh you’re also telling my story as an actor.” That’s how Cathy Curtin felt. Just if you’ve had a longer career as a woman and if you’ve been around a couple decades, you’ve seen some things.
But I think that I also needed to have the courage to be like, “Well, I want to tell this story whether or not it’s something that 100% of men are going to be like, ‘Right on, sister.’ It’s still worth telling the story. That’s something that Elizabeth Cook did give me confidence to do, because of the confidence she takes writing a song that’s meaningful to her and getting up in front of a microphone. I mean, all of you musical performers blow my mind with your courage. So that, I was also like, “Well, I should be courageous about what I’m trying to do, if you guys are going to be courageous like that.
Elizabeth N: Elizabeth, did you have more you want to add to that?
Elizabeth C: No, I was just going to say two things and not ideally this random, but the music business and country radio is full of skeezy, dumb men. It’s like rampant, I’m used to that, but to find out that that exists in film world which I consider more sophisticated and then even my nieces that are in academia and stuff, “Oh I’m doing this fellowship at Cornell and there’s the misogyny in that.” I was like, “You’ve got to be kidding me. I only thought it was for dumb people but yeah, it turns out that it’s not. Just dumb people and really a lot of the I guess, balls or chutzpah or whatever you want to call it, to be brazen, for me, actually came from a man: my father. He was just, “You’re the only boy I’ve got and you’re going to be a badass,” and insisted on that mentality around me. So that helped.
Elizabeth N: Your film was both deeply innovative, and as a film dork, obviously immediately made me think about other films that had engendered the same kind of emotional response in me. You must have inevitably been thinking of Altman’s Nashville while you were making this.
Katy: In terms of Robert Altman’s Nashville, sometimes when I was talking to people about the project and the way these projects work you have to talk about them to hundreds of people before they exist and try to have them come to life in somebody’s mind’s eye, which is really challenging. I feel like I’m not—I don’t know if anybody’s very good at it but I’m not great at it. So, people are often just, I just felt like I encountered a lot of furrowed brows when I was describing it to people. People would say, “How are you going to make the documentary footage and the fiction talk? It’s going to look different. People are going to be able to tell. It’s going to feel clunky”, whatever, all the things and of course, I was worried about all of that.
I did say to some people who had some understanding of Nashville and familiarity with Nashville, the city. I would sometimes joke that I was inspired by Nashville, Nashville, and Nashville, which meant Nashville, the Robert Altman movie, Nashville, the television show and Nashville, the city. All of them informed me and I was like, “You know, I wanted it to have the fun of the Nashville TV show, which brought Nashville, the city, all over the world through syndication. Like, a lot of people connect with this material because they saw that show. That’s how I got to see Charles Esten, so then we cast him in the movie. It’s like the contemporary kind of mainstream portrayal of Nashville.
Altman’s movie, there’s a genius to the looseness of it. So, I’m glad you appreciated the looseness of The Easy Kind, and I need to credit Emily Topper, our DP who really kind of was my reality check as a filmmaker. The buck stops with your DP. Like, I would sometimes say, “Wouldn’t it be cool if we could make it look like this,” and she would be like, “Well, with the time we have and the lighting package I have, these are the things I could do.” I think it’s good that I come from a documentary background because I love how the real world looks. I don’t need to be in a fantasy world for something to look beautiful on film in my mind.
I think the real world is amazing looking and the real world we were looking at was the real world of these clubs in East Nashville of Elizabeth Cook’s home. I just thought all these places were fantastic looking aesthetically. I like the idea of them being lit with natural light, which is easy and not expensive as opposed to big bright lights. So fortunately, I chose—this is my documentary experience—I chose a world and a reality that already felt like cinema without doing too much to it. But I don’t think there is a particular film like The Easy Kind. In fact, also side note our publicist Emma Myers said to me when we got like one reviewer who was like, “I couldn’t tell whether this movie was a documentary or a narrative or what it was.”
Emma said, “Katy, you’ve created a new genre, so some people are going to be confused.” She was like, “I’m just telling you, like when you do something new like that, I’m sure Elizabeth Cook can relate with music. People are like, “Wait, I thought this was a blah, and it turns out it’s a bleh.” Now, I’ve never seen a bleh before and plus I’m confused because I thought I was watching a blah.” Then they can’t really get over it in time to review your film differently. Like, they’re stuck on that cognitive dissonance point.
That’s also something I’ve learned in this sharing process is, I’ve actually also had a few people say to me who aren’t really film people say, “Oh, at first I wasn’t sure what you were doing. Then I kind of got into it.” I don’t feel like we were doing anything mysterious. For me I was like, “This is the way I had to tell the story. I couldn’t think of any other way to tell this story than this way. It really was a form follows function thing.” I was like, “I want to do it scripted so we can talk about the things that are true while keeping my privacy and Elizabeth’s privacy intact because we’re real living humans on planet earth. Then I also want to take risks and have play, like Elizabeth said, it was fun. But I’d be an idiot to cast and make a fake concert. We should use documentary footage for the concerts because they’re awesome. So, I just was having my cake and eating it too, “Let’s do documentary footage for this part because it’ll look better. Let’s do fiction for this part because it feels more interesting.” So yeah, it was like a big experiment. I shouldn’t say that, but it was.
Elizabeth N: Well, I think it all flows together seamlessly. It looks beautiful. Okay, so Elizabeth Cook, the artist, not EC, you are putting out a record this August. In The Easy Kind, we see EC recording a new album. So, at the risk of asking a magician to reveal the secret to her tricks are those filmed scenes actual recording sessions from your new album or were those studio sessions that you scripted?
Elizabeth C: Those were actual sessions, but my new album was tracked after the film was locked. So even though the theme song to the film is on the new record with Wynonna singing a verse, which is really cool but not in the film. So, you have to buy the record to get that version, I guess. So yeah, it’s different things.
Elizabeth N: Wynonna Judd? I didn’t know anything about that. What else should people know about your new record?
Elizabeth C: I mean, it’s another go at making an album that is a long and laborious process that I love, that goes in different phases from writing and woodshedding and writing and woodshedding and then curating the band, the studio, the producer and going through multiple rounds of sessions and overdubs and retakes. Then mixes and remixes and then sequencing and then artwork. So, every time that I go through this process I hope that it gets more refined and I hope that I get better at it. I feel like my writing really took a turn on the Welder album and got really densely narrative. That continued through the Exodus of Venus and Aftermath albums where at those turns, I became more sonically experimental, and this album I really was looking to be super concise.
So I wanted a dense narrative, but I wanted it in a three-minute pop song form. I wanted a catchy chorus, no four or five verse rambles with words where it’s almost like rap, how quickly the lines fly by, and the references are deep dives into rabbit holes of poems and books and things that people wouldn’t know of just by hearing. So, I really tried to really merge a lot of things on this one. I’m proud of that; I hope it translates and that was sort of my personal M.O. in working on this particular one. I was trying to continue to refine the artistic process and journey with what I’m putting out.
Elizabeth N: Well, the burst of inspiration from both of you has been nothing short of extraordinary. Neither of you were ever the easy kind, and that has made all the difference. I thank you both profoundly for this film, and for this talk.
Screenings of The Easy Kind:
Portland, OR – July 23
Cinema 21
616 NW 21st Ave, Portland, OR 97209
Seattle, WA- July 25
Tasveer Film Center
4812 Rainier Ave S, Seattle, WA 98118
New Orleans, LA- July 27
Prytania Theatre
5339 Prytania St, New Orleans, LA 70115
Saugerties, NY- August 3
156 Main St, Saugerties, NY 12477
Nashville, TN- August 10
Belcourt Theatre
2102 Belcourt Ave, Nashville, TN 37212
