In the spring of 2020, Ben Cook, a.k.a. Young Guv, Young Governor, or just Guv, found himself holed up in the New Mexico high desert, his band’s U.S. tour having been abruptly cancelled by Covid during its Southwestern leg. Suddenly he and his bandmates were living moment to moment in something called an Earthship — a solar-rigged adobe structure sustainably constructed with recycled bottles and tires — and out there in the serene vastness, a short “ride it out” stint turned into a nine month sojourn that resulted in two albums worth of Young Guv’s most compelling and hook-filled songs yet: GUV III and GUV IV.
“I’d never been to New Mexico,” Cook explains, “I’m a Canadian from a city, I was living in New York City, we were in the middle of a tour, and then all us are suddenly in this totally new environment. We were sharing money, sharing a place to live, really banding together even more so than when you’re on tour. That’s already an insular situation but this was something else.” The group’s daily life was ad hoc, communal, idyllic, almost Utopian. “It was beautiful,” Cook 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.” But the work was different and much more daunting. Though the marooned sextet had built themselves a makeshift studio for their new home, inspiration was slow and sporadic. “I was isolated, the world was in complete chaos,” Cook 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.”
In a place he never expected to be, under circumstances no one could have predicted, and in the face of physical isolation and existential dread, new music still began to come together little by little, mostly at night while the others slept. “We spent more time in nature than we did doing music stuff,” Cook explains. “We were just so in awe of our surroundings, we knew this time and moment wouldn’t last and it felt like something that needed to be appreciated. I can set up a studio wherever but I knew I wasn’t going to live in a Taos Earthship forever. I ended up collecting random bouts of creativity whenever they came but it was chaos compared to how I would normally write.” Finally in early 2021, Cook and his band left Taos and headed for Los Angeles to record. It was a vastly different mood but in that more structured environment GUV III and GUV IV started to come into focus. “When we got to LA it felt like time to start sorting through everything,” he says. “We were sharing a house again, we got the whole band together and we carved out a couple weeks to start really hammering it out. I found the routine again – wake up, have breakfast, and then just start banging things out.”
While this was a particularly unusual period of writing and recording, Cook’s musical journey is a restless and nomadic one. This goes all the way back to his first serious band, hardcore heavyweights, No Warning, who formed in 1998 and became legends over the course of their initial eight-year run. He then spent the rest of the 2000s and 2010s as a guitarist with boundary-pushing punks, Fucked Up, who among their contemporaries were unequalled in their sonic and intellectual ambition. But Guv represents Cook’s most personal songwriting outlet and since taking on the moniker (or some form of it) in 2008, he’s issued piles of singles and EPs, along with several full-lengths. Along the way he’s dipped a toe into any musical style that’s suited him and always excelled. Whether it’s scrappy first wave punk, crunchy guitar pop, or even ’80s influenced yacht rock, Cook’s ability to write a true earworm has been the most consistent part of his repertoire.
While Cook’s unparalleled knack for melody is often the most instantly striking part of his work, he’s also no slouch at packing an emotional punch in the lyrics. The previous two Young Guv full-lengths, 2019’s GUV I and GUV II, explored the loneliness of living in the modern world, a condition that intensified even further in 2020. Now out in the desert, where nothing was familiar, it was as if Cook 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 — Cook 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. The result is two albums worth of songs are dedicated to the eternal healing power of love — how to find it in the the world, in others, and most importantly, in himself.
Fittingly, the new albums are marked by a sense of intense yearning to connect and to achieve a measure of inner peace. The songs may range widely in style and mood — GUV III and GUV IV treat listeners to perfect power pop, Laurel Canyon-esque janglers, Madchester-inspired rave ups, British Invasion garage rockers, AM-radio Americana, homemade sophisti-pop, and more — but there’s a sense of longing that binds them together. Cook unabashedly says the records “document of my two years away from the world. My healing,” adding that, “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 a worldwide cataclysm, without a detour to the sacred mountains, but it happened in its own peculiar way 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. For Cook it’s still unknown where his path from GUV III and GUV IV will lead, but it seems to be heading for another adventure. After tracking in Los Angeles, he decamped to Mexico — old Mexico — where the healing process has taken yet another surprising turn: “I’m taking a complete break from music,” he says. “I haven’t picked up a guitar since the record wrapped. I’m learning Spanish and boxing.”
