By Eduardo Jáuregui Martínez

Power Ballads, a short-story collection from the hands of Will Boast, is a love letter to music and the life of a musician, as seen through the lens of Tim, the de facto protagonist of the book. Through a grounded and unromantic approach, Boast brings a personal lens to the passion and abandon experienced on and off the stage, with all the human drama to be expected in it.
In Sitting In, Boast introduces us to a young Tim, at that time a tuba player in small-town Wisconsin, with respective small-town ambitions and small-town dreams, “I remember those great bands. Those bands that played pizza joints, VFW halls, and schnitzel houses all over southeast Wisconsin.” The young musician’s drive to play in a local polka band initially serves to connect with his widowed father and with the migrant community frequenting the hall where the band plays. But soon, as music’s power to connect is shown, we are also reminded of its ability to disconnect when Tim’s push to perform runs at the expense of Ertold, an enigmatic gas station worker—and the tubist of the band. With no side willing to cede, the scenario leads to an imminent crash, Ertold chasing the kid out of the band, while making himself a pariah to the community. The story fades away with a feel that something has changed in Tim’s life, shedding his tuba for the drums, and his previous connection with his father devolving into estrangement and distance.
The headlining story, Power Ballads, is injected with an overarching sense of melancholy. Tim, now a bustling member of the Chicago music scene, tells Kate, his girlfriend and the second quasi-protagonist of the collection, about his time with “Soldier,” a “shitty radio-rock band” from the 80’s trying to launch their comeback while in the midst of mid-life crises. Boast uses those pages to describe the highs, lows, and odd facets of the artistic life, from the need to chase after all the gigs possible just to meet month’s end, to the thrill of performing, properly expressed: “…and I came in on the toms with holy thunder, crashed into the downbeat, and started laying it down with the smiling conviction of a Vegas magician, a gentleman bank robber, a serial killer, a lying politician, utterly drunk on my own mastery.” The last scene, a performance of DMZ of Love (the “power ballad” of the title), is a gut-punch of emotions, with the revelation of band leader Billy Takamura’s daughter’s death and her importance to the song, alongside Tim’s decision to leave the band adding a newfound weight to the ending. He reaches the height of the song—and yet, we can’t help but feel a tinge of melancholy in this elusive victory. Tim flees from “Soldier”, flees from the heavy sentiments attached to the song, and flees from the possibility of being vulnerable.
Boast does not end the collection there. Instead, he continues showcasing that Tim is still a character in need, in want of something: connection. Tim is in search of the kind of connection that won’t hurt him. By allowing him to keep his distance, music is a perfect vehicle for such human connection, where a performer is above or around people but not with them. Any other kind of connection always comes with too much hurt attached. Boast closes off Tim and Kate’s story with Coda, which chronicles the couple’s breakup after a failed engagement. It wasn’t meant to be, as the new responsibilities of engaged life and the financial instability of music as a vocation soon leads to rupture. The end of Coda doesn’t result in a rekindling of their lost love but with a final, cathartic release of emotions; Tim makes a last moment connection with Luke, the other musician ex-boyfriend of Kate, while trashing her apartment with paint and sharing their mutual jealousies.
Through a strong prose and masterful characterizations, Boast makes us care. We care enough to want Tim to forgive his father before he dies, we want him to settle down with Kate at the end of the day (and ask forgiveness for her apartment), and we of course want him to continue shredding those drums, playing the experimental jazz that he so loves, managing to scrape by yet another day, yet another week. Power Ballads makes us understand the love and desperation that music brings to one’s life, freeing ourselves from technicalterms galore and instead showing us the musician life as it is, with its defeats and victories, its low lows and its high highs, showing us, most of all, the innate humanity hidden in the bandstand.
Eduardo Jáuregui Martínez is an international student from Irapuato, Mexico, now finishing his undergraduate degree on Creative Writing at John Paul the Great Catholic University in Escondido, California. When not worried by college assignments, he enjoys brewing coffee with his espresso machine, reading books of long-dead authors, and writing about faraway worlds and melancholic protagonists.
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