Did you ever yearn for life as a musician? Ecstatic fans, groupie falling all over themselves, roadies jumping and a fetching to serve your genius and record companies lining up to sign you to the deal of a life time?
Then read this book because that isn’t how it goes. Will Boast, winner of the prestigious Iowa Short Fiction Award, bestowed on a first time author for short fiction by the Iowa Writers Workshop has written a collection of stories that are powerful, moving and explore the real life of a musician. From the moment you are bitten by the muse, to that moment you first play in public. From your first paying gig, to the ego of the other players that will compliment your life.
The stories also explore the complications a musicians life takes on with relationships, romance, his own ego and priorities. The necessity of ‘selling out’ to pay the rent. It’s all here, from the hotel barroom gigs to the stadiums, the sound studios of legendary status to sleeping in your practice space. And underneath it all, like the steady thrum of a bass, is the muse, the ‘high’, the addiction of your need to play music.
The stories read with a rhythm worthy of a great piece of music. The pace, collectively and individually is that of a symphony. Thought provoking, emotionally moving bring tears of loss and joyful laughs the next moment. The stories and the plot – all fiction must have a plot – seem to write themselves. They don’t seem contrived or made up, but pulled from the lives of real road worn musicians. And the characters, ah the characters. I know these guys. I have shaken my head at some of them and punched out others. I have high-fived them on dive-bar stage, and bought them drinks at the Ramada Inn at 2 am. I’ve sabotaged their gear and sat in awe of what they could do with a piece of wood or brass.
Power Ballads
Will Boast is an Englishman who grew up in Ireland and Wisconsin, and I have a feeling, knew some musicians. He has a wonderful eye for detail in his stories which have graced the pages of such publications as Best New American Voices 2009, Narrative, Glimmer Train, The Southern Review, The American Scholar, and Five Points and the way he writes he his fated to grace the pages of even more. Until 2010 he was a Stegner Fellow in fiction at Stanford University and by now he is back in England as the Charles Pick Fellow at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, not far from the cottage I lived in back in the ‘70s. Rumor has it that he is currently working on a novel and a memoir, so write down his name, you will want to remember it.
Copyright © 2011 Robert Carraher All Rights Reserved
Article first published as Book Review: Power Ballads by Will Boast on Blogcritics.
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