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| courtesy of Michael Maas |
 On the keys: Keyboardist/vocalist Michael Maas recently released an album titled ÒMagellan & Pele.Ó Most of it, along with previously recorded material, can be found at www.michaelmaasmusic.com. |
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If the initial challenge of playing keyboards for the audio and video extravaganza of "The Who's Tommy" at Perseverance Theatre inflicted the agony of a hundred paper cuts, what Michael Maas did at home alone induced birth pains.
The keyboardist/vocalist's current projects couldn't be more different in character, but his musings about them reveal a unity of the dramatic and unorthodox that's common to his work.
Listeners saturated with other sensory activity during "Tommy" can now hear Maas almost entirely solo on his just-released album "Magellan & Pele." Most of it, plus a large amount of previously recorded material, can be downloaded free at his Web site www.michaelmaasmusic.com.
The local elementary school music teacher's written sales pitch for the album is "four-minute, keyboard-based, well-crafted pop operas. Big cheesy choruses and left turns aplenty. And did we mention the beatboxing?"
But in an interview from his home, he said it's also a collection of character-oriented songs written in recent years in an album named for some of his most meaningful recent personal experiences.
"Magellan was my first cat's name," he said. "He was my companion all through college. Pele is from when I went on a trip to Venezuela, and Pele was my Spanish name. That was the trip where I met my wife-to-be."
Music has long been a part of Maas' life. His father, Ron Maas, plays trumpet for the Thunder Mountain Big Band, and his mom, Kathy, is a symphony violinist.
He was the keyboardist for Perseverance's "Hedwig and The Angry Inch." He released his debut album "Speechless Again" in 2002 and said his current goal is to write a song a month for the rest of the year.
Maas said he usually writes two different types of songs, although his new album frequently illustrates how "those two halves of me are coming together as time goes by."
"One (type) is verse/chorus standard sort of pop songs ... then I have this other kind of song, which is kind of a stream-of-consciousness thing that works with whatever comes along (and) jumps and uses a lot of weird time signatures," he said.
On "Magellan & Pele," serious lyrics tend to mix with odd pacing and vice versa, Maas said. He also emphasizes a more mature vocal approach, limiting the vocal range of previous projects, which sometimes went beyond his comfort zone.
He recorded the album at home, except for a few harmonizing vocals by Frances Field. He said he's taking a few weeks to recover after "Tommy" but hopes to have an album release party or performance around the end of May or beginning of June.
One of the songs, "Half-Hearted Stab," won a weekly competition at the Web site www.songfight.org, where he has contributed several recordings. Maas said he makes most of his work freely available online because he's more interested in artistic than commercial exposure.
"My main goal with this is I just want people to hear it," he said. "Any money I make from it, I just roll into making more music."
