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Young Guv is Ben Cook.

Ben Cook is a songwriter, a dedicated and prolific songwriter of rare talent. The real deal. In the summer of 2018, Ben moved from his Toronto home to a sublet in Brooklyn, and there he began writing some of the best songs of his life.

GUV I, out on Run For Cover in July, is a collection of pop music — staggeringly poignant and infectious pop music — written and recorded by Ben Cook throughout that New York City summer.

Cook describes Young Guv songs as akin to “people-watching in a foreign country in the morning, trying not to cry from the overwhelming feeling of sadness and happiness.” Another way of putting it would be that Young Guv songs are about being alone. And this at a time in history when more people feel more alone than ever before. And so, as if sensing an opportunity for some kind of communion, Young Guv has made a discography out of conjuring the peculiar desolation that arises when you’re somehow by yourself in a discrete physical space — perhaps in a small Brooklyn apartment in the heat of a New York summer — surrounded nonetheless by millions of other isolated, solitary people, literally any one of whom you could, for all you know, love with all your heart for the rest of your life, but almost none of whom will, you’re ultimately forced to admit, become anything more than a briefly transfixing stranger, at best a wraith that haunts your dreams. Cook sings the vicious cycle to life on “Roll Wit Me”: “I can't place who you are / So familiar and brand new / What is it that you've got / So effortlessly cool / You don't have to look at all / Ya why would you anyways / All I wanna do is talk / I just don't know what to say / But I can't wake up in my bed / alone another day.”

1. Patterns Prevail
2. Roll With me
3. Every Flower I See
4. Luv Always
5. Didn’t Even Cry
6. High On My Mind
7. Exceptionally Ordinary
8. A Boring Story