more from
Run For Cover Records
We’ve updated our Terms of Use to reflect our new entity name and address. You can review the changes here.
We’ve updated our Terms of Use. You can review the changes here.

GUV III

by Young Guv

supported by
HurleyBess
HurleyBess thumbnail
HurleyBess You've heard this album a million times before. It's dripping in cliches. And its genius is that it breathes new life into all of them. Hey, being original isn't that original. Young Guv masterfully deploys every trick in the book in these immediate, infectious, essential pop-songs. What a great album! A love letter to anglophone guitar music, and a welcome new chapter in its history. Hilariously perfect.
Norm Fischer
Norm Fischer thumbnail
Norm Fischer Nobody doing better work in the mining of classic pop rock today! Favorite track: Only Wanna See U Tonight.
Mikepaints
Mikepaints thumbnail
Mikepaints Truly timeless, epically beautiful Favorite track: I Couldn't Leave U If I Tried.
Emmanuel Manur
Emmanuel Manur thumbnail
Emmanuel Manur Easily the best power-pop of 2022 so far. Favorite track: Lo Lo Lonely.
more...
/
  • Streaming + Download

    Includes unlimited streaming via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
    Purchasable with gift card

      $8 USD  or more

     

  • Single LP Sold out - 2xLP GUV III & IV available now
    Record/Vinyl + Digital Album

    Limited to 350 Copies. Released by Run For Cover Records

    While the one-time pressing of GUV III is sold out, you can now order the 2xLP with both GUV III & IV here: youngguv.bandcamp.com/album/guv-iii-iv

    Includes unlimited streaming of GUV III via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.

    Sold Out

1.
I treasure the feeling  Forever like a sunbeam on my bed  Your light so sweetly beamin’  Made rainbows on the pillow by my head  Old feelings stir inside  Staring off into the night  Couldn’t leave U if I tried  If I tried  My whole life has lost its meaning But I can’t lose my song or lose my light  Despite this hopeless feeling  I still have never seen a star so bright  Old feelings stir inside  Staring off into the night  Couldn’t leave U if I tried  If I tried  Times feel so strange  But I still love you all the same  And it’s you I’m hangin’ onto  Ya it’s you I’m hangin’ onto  I can’t escape the emptiness inside Couldn’t leave U if I tried  These old feelings stir inside  Staring off into the night  I can’t shake these old feelings  Can’t put aside  You’re still runnin’ through my mind  Couldn’t leave U if I tried 
2.
Baby I just gotta move  But I’m forbidden to go outside I got a brand new pair of boots  And a shirt so loud I wanna show the world how I can slide  It’s only dancin’ It’s only dancin’ but it feels alright  It’s only dancin’ That I’m needin’ tonite  It’s only dancin’ I gotta bad case of pins and needles  Ya my legs have been subdued  If I could shake ‘em off  And run to ya You know I would  I wish to skip down the avenue  It’s only dancin’ It’s dancin’ but it feels alright It’s only dancin’ that I’m missin’ tonite  It’s only dancin’ I just need to take a peak  And see what it’s like So I break the window open wide  In blows a fantasy of days gone by Standin’ shoulder to shoulder Side by side  It’s only dancin’ It’s only dancin’ but it feels alright  It’s only dancin’ That I’m needin’ Don’t need a reason  Give me one tonight  It’s only dancin’
3.
Lo Lo Lonely 03:28
I don’t think it could any worse than this A broken heart  One last kiss  I will disappear now  How could I resist  Into a fog  I don’t exist  
So so long  Cuz for now this love is gone  Forever now  I’ll always be  Lo Lonely  
Now all I do is sit here and look at the hills  I’m wrinkled velvet  I’m unfulfilled  I wanna show you how the light shines through the trees  I can’t resist these pretty things  
So so long  Cuz for now everything’s gone  Forever now I’ll always be  Lo Lonely  
Tears linger on inside  And the pains too much for me  Ya I’ll always be  Lo Lonely  Lo Lo Lonely 
4.
Just when I told ya that I want to work things through  Just when I thought it would be safe to tell the truth  I see his arms are around you  I only wanna see u tonite I only wanna blow out your candle light  It’s you I wanna luv and make feel alright   And I swear I’m gonna like no one before  If he can’t make you feel like I do  It’s time to choose  I tried to phone ya Now I’m knockin’ at your door  I thought I knew you better  But you're lyin’ more and more  And now it’s him that you adore  I only wanna see u tonite I only wanna blow out your candle light  It’s you I wanna luv and make feel alright   And I swear I’m gonna like no one before  I dont care cuz you are mine and I am yours  If he don’t make you feel like I do Then why am I not the one for you 
5.
Good Time 03:07
This year my heart hung low  She lifts me through my sorrow  It’s fadin' day by day  Horizon getting clearer  Oh oh  Like the sun through the trees  She came to love me Like a leaf on a breeze  She blew me away  Baby come take me on a sunset ride  She’s my good time  She’s my brightside  She’s my real good time  Good time  I'm fallin' down below  I may not see tomorrow  Whatever comes my way  Could make me see things clearer  Oh oh  Like the sun through the trees  She came to love me Like a leaf on a breeze  She blew me away  Maybe I’m crazy I’m so twisted inside She’s my good time  She’s my brightside  She’s my real good time  Good time  It’s been an upside down  Cold cold year  Trying to recognize  These shadows in the mirror 
6.
Sunrise on my window pane Light upon her skin again A winding line I followed here Out of a story  Take Up All My Time Don’t worry about nothin’ Lay it down to rest  It’s either blue or red  Another year lookin’ down at my shoes I watch everyone dance But all I see is you  The space I have been movin’ in  It feels bigger than anything  I sit with my shadows again  And the flutter of my heart  Take Up All My Time Don’t worry about nothin’ Lay it down to rest  It’s either blue or red  Another year lookin’ down at my shoes I watch everyone dance But all I see is you 
7.
Solitary blue Milk grey doom Got a lot of things But I aint got u  With that soft serene And the color green  I am incomplete You without me  And sometimes it just happens that way  Passing through a fabric landscape Tears are always clouding my eyes But I ain’t got u  And things wont feel right til i do  Touch your cheek to mine Stop my heart in time Nothing matters now Cuz I ain’t got u  Maybe someday soon With the stars in tune  A secret melody  I only hear from u  I find behind the fringe of my eye  The gentleness of your reflection  Fears are always clouding my mind But I ain’t got u  And things wont feel right til i do  Captive dumb and useless I slip deeper secluded  With all tomorrows gone There will be something or someone  Out of the blue  That’s keeping me from you  No I cant wait til June  Solitary milk grey doom  Touch your check to mine Stop my heart in time  Nothing matters now  Cuz I ain’t got u 
8.
Head first into the ether  In the dark too long  Fading out like shadow  When the light is gone  Only wish that I could see you again  I’m afraid you ain’t my only weakness  I was dying to be with you all the time  But it’s so hard to breathe when you’re barely alive  See things shifting coming into view  But in the corner of your eye  I’m still the same old fool  Goes on and on its endless  The road is long and cruel  No turning back  I’m just the same old fool  Is it a curse  Part of a pattern  I’ve been in way too long  Theres no answers  It might be better  Now that you’re movin’ on  Only wish that I could see you again  I’m afraid you ain’t my only weakness  I was dying to be with you all the time  But it’s so hard to breathe when you’re barely alive  See things shifting coming into view  But in the corner of your eye  I’m still the same old fool  Goes on and on its endless  It’s pointless to assume  I’m something more than  Just the same old fool  Same Old Fool 
9.
She’s a desert of affection  I’m an ocean of blue  She ain’t payin’ no attention  She don’t cry for anyone  She don’t cry for anyone  My tears are always plenty  But she don’t cry for anyone  She’s a blizzard in the summer  Where the flowers don’t bloom  I don’t wanna be a downer but She don’t cry for anyone  She don’t cry for anyone  My tears are always plenty  But she don’t cry for anyone  When it’s all said and done Not me Not you  Not anyone  She made me think I was the one  But now it’s her I’m runnin’ from  Was she really feelin’ nothing  Cold as water on the moon  And just as distant too  She don’t cry for anyone  She don’t cry for anyone  My tears are always plenty  But she don’t cry for anyone  It was all a dream  A fantasy  And I woke to reality  I cry for you but you don’t for me 
10.
Scam Likely 03:42
I often wonder  If I can really be sure  Where would I exist  If I existed at all  Over and under  Tell me what normals for Maybe I’m a bit too tired of it all  I’m gone  Beyond  And I’m barely holding on And I know theres nothing I can do about it  Tell me you love me  Tell me that I’m adored  And burn me with your starlight  Evermore  For now I’ll keep my dreamin' And just pretend  And be both here and now Both now and then  I’m gone  Beyond  And I’m barely holding on And I don’t know if I can wrap my head around it I’m gone  Beyond  Hopeless feelings linger on  And I know theres nothing I can do about it  Feel the darkness come my way  Hear the wind keep me awake  Feel my hands begin to shake  I’m gone  Nothing I can do about it  Nothing I can do about it  No I can’t wrap my head around it
11.
You’re the April of my life  A cool showery day  On a slippery street  I’m tumblin’ away  A brighter day and darker nights  The smell of a new rain  Walk for miles on the streets  Take my breath away  When I am older I’ll get to know her Again and Again and Again  You’re the April of my life  I’m the end of May  I watch the fireflies  Like bubbles in champagne  I was staring at the sky  A dome of white and blue  A water lily in the night  Gazing at the moon  When I am older I’ll get to know her Again and Again and Again  Ooh aah  Ooh aah aah  Ooh aah aah aah  Ooh ooh aah aah aah  She’s the April of my life  She’s the April of my life  She’s the April of my life  She’s the April of my life 

about

In the spring of 2020, Ben Cook — a.k.a. Young Governor, Young Guv, or just Guv — was holed up in the New Mexico high desert, his U.S. tour having been abruptly covid-cancelled during a southwest swing. He and his bandmates were living moment to moment in something called an Earthship, a solar-rigged adobe structure sustainably constructed with, among other things, recycled bottles and tires. And out there in the serene vastness, as a short ride-it-out stint turned into a nine-month sojourn, Ben was writing music, slowly, little by little, mostly at night while the others slept. By the New Year, almost in spite of himself, he had created a new album, two new albums actually, and through the ordeal he was forever changed.
In a place he never expected to be, under circumstances no one could have predicted, and in the face of physical isolation, emotional desolation, and existential dread, Ben created GUV III & IV, a collection of songs dedicated and testifying to the eternal healing power of love — how to find it in the the world, in others, and most importantly, in himself. Written in the New Mexico wilderness and produced in Los Angeles, the double album will be released on Run For Cover later next year.

In New Mexico, daily life was ad hoc, communal, idyllic, almost Utopian. Ben and his five mates shared everything, all their money, shelter, and meals (Ben did the cooking). “It was beautiful,” he says. “We were at the foot of the Taos Mountain, part of the Sangre de Cristo range, one of the seven sacred mountain ranges in the world. I swam in the Rio Grande every day. The memory is surreal.”
Work was different — much more daunting. Though the marooned sextet had built themselves a makeshift studio for their little clay casa, inspiration was slow and sporadic. “I was isolated, the world was in complete chaos,” Ben says. “I lost control of the routine that I thrive in. I worked on songs more randomly, only when I felt like it. I was hard on myself for not writing enough. Truthfully, I don’t even remember doing most of it. I was removed from the process, in a way, somehow alienated from my own creativity.”
Isolation amid chaos, a thrumming feeling of alienation from oneself and others — this wasn’t exactly new territory. Two years ago, when Ben released his last record, the double-album set called GUV I & II, he likened the songs to “people-watching in a foreign country in the morning.” He was talking about the loneliness of living in the modern world, a condition that, for most people, was intensifying even before 2020.
And it went back further than the previous album cycle. Ben’s been at this a long time, making music and doing the thing that artists do: noticing what goes in the world, in all its discontents, while everyone else plays dumb. He formed his first serious band, No Warning, in 1998, and over the course of their initial eight-year run they became legends, the Toronto teenagers who perfected New York hardcore, channelling all the anger, resentment, and confusion of that awful War on Terror period, which everyone wanted to forget even as it was happening. Then he spent the rest of the 2000s and 2010s as a guitarist in Fucked Up, who among their contemporaries were unequalled in their intellectual ambition, their capacity to sublimate all that anger and alienation into something profound, erudite, and redemptively strange.
“Guv” has been Ben’s personal songwriting outlet since 2008. Under that name and its derivatives he’s issued a pile of singles and EPs and several full-lengths. Before 2020, Ben says, the songs tended to come, if not easily, then at least efficiently, regularly, reliably, owing to a work ethic he describes as “a bit maniacal.”
But out in the desert, where nothing was familiar (“The energy there was unlike anything I’d experienced”), it was if he was living outside himself. The old processes he had relied on, the patterns that had prevailed in his former life, no longer seemed to apply. And so they had to change. Given narrowing outer horizons — the shrinking of social life to just five fellow campesinos, the looming prospects of a ruined career and a collapsing society — Ben was forced to broaden his inner horizons, to spend long days and nights under the giant sky figuring out what actually matters and what’s really been inside people’s heads, his and everyone else’s, during these past years of decadence and decline.
Accordingly, the new songs are marked by a sense of intense yearning to connect — with other people, other beings, other energies — and to achieve by those means a measure of inner peace. The very first verse of very first track, “Couldn’t Leave U if I Tried,” whose opening guitar lines are pure-cut Roger McGuinn-esque arpeggiated bliss a la Guv, sets the tone and establishes the stakes:
I treasure the feeling 
Forever like a sunbeam on my bed 
Your light so sweetly beamin’ 
Made rainbows on the pillow by my head 
Again and agin, in song after song — which range widely in style and mood, from Laurel Canyon jangle to British Invasion blues-pop to AM-radio Americana to the mildly sleazy electro pop that is something of a signature — we hear variations on the theme of those opening lines: If, as seems likely, we’re moving from a “love is all you need” world to a “love is all you can have” world, then what’s to be done except “watch the fireflies like bubbles in champagne,” as Ben sings in “April of My Life.”

Ben calls the new album “a document of my two years away from the world. My healing.”
“Through real work in therapy over a long period, as well as spending many months isolated and alone, I have started to finally access my true self little by little, and it’s reflected in this music.”
Maybe that process would have happened anyway, without the world cataclysm, without the detour to the sacred mountains. But it happened in its peculiar way, and in a holy place, and so we have this poignant and beautiful two-album set, which couldn’t have been made in any other timeline or under any other conditions.
It’s an open question where exactly the timeline that begins with GUV III & IV leads. After tracking the albums in L.A. in early 2021, Ben decamped to Mexico — old Mexico — where the healing process has taken yet another surprising turn.
“I’m taking a complete break from music,” Ben says. “I haven’t picked up a guitar since the record wrapped. I’m learning Spanish and boxing.”

credits

released March 11, 2022

Produced By Young Guv 
Co-Produced By Tony Price 
Recorded By Jonny Bell @ Jazzcat Studios, Rob Campanella @ Figment Sounds, Guv @ Taos New Mexico & Brooklyn NY 
Mixed By Steve Chahley, Guv & Tony Price
“But I Ain’t Got U” Mixed By Alex Gamble 
Mastered By Phil Demetro 
Design By Braulio Amado 
Photography By Danielle Parsons 
All Vocals & Guitars By Guv 
Guitars & Vocals By Tommy Major
Bass By Ryan Gavel 
Drums By Richard Gowen
Additional Lead Guitars On “April Of My Life”, “But I Ain’t Got U”, “Scam Likely” By Noah Kohll 
Drums on “April Of My Life” By Noah Kohll 
Additional BG Vocals & Keyboards By Bobbie Lovesong 
Additional Guitars on “Good Time” By James Matthew VII
Strings on “Take Up All My Time” By Megan Siebe 
Steel on “Take Up All My Time” By Jon Catfish DeLorme 
Flute on “April Of My Life” By Tara Milch

license

all rights reserved

tags

about

Young Guv Toronto, Ontario

contact / help

Contact Young Guv

Streaming and
Download help

Redeem code

Report this album or account

If you like Young Guv, you may also like: