Roger Mas: "20 years ago I would have sold my soul for a good song, now I just want to be happy

Roger Mas is more a modern troubadour than a conventional singer-songwriter. Or, rather, he is the singer-songwriter of Verdaguer, whose rebellious spirit he vindicates, or of Maragall, whom he has made ascend Parnassus in his latest album. The author from Solsona invites us to explore this Greek mountain, with mythological connotations and considered the residence of the muses, where we can find wonderful lyrics about our land, nature, tradition, and roots. It is his tenth work, twenty years after the first, Les flors del somni (1997).

As the title itself evokes, Mas returns to the world of poets, which he knows so well, adapting texts by Joan Maragall, Miquel Martí i Pol, Eulalia d'Anzizu, Toni Gol i Roca, and Amadeu Vidal i Bonafont. One of his gifts is the ability to recover ancient texts and traditional songs, but when they pass through his hand, they sound absolutely contemporary. As a backdrop to the album, the usual setting: the country, its traditions and contradictions, and the eternal conflict with Spain.

In Catalan singer-songwriting, there is a long tradition of extracting music from poetry, and he does it with maturity and balance, without stridency. "It's very hard to reach this balance. When I started 20 years ago, I would have sold my soul for a good song; now I know that I only want to be happy doing what I do." And for now, he has succeeded, as he is one of the few musicians in our country who can live exclusively from his profession and also enjoys the small worldly pleasures without giving up being himself: "you have to know how to play between acceptance, not resignation, and the impulse to do new things." For the singer-songwriter, "life must be lived, and one must know one's own limits, to push them from time to time." He enjoys this vital struggle from his native Solsona, a constant source of his inspiration and the place that most keeps his feet on the ground. We have conversed, for The New Barcelona Post, in "Cal Trepat," an old agricultural machinery factory in Tàrrega, as a symbol of his rootedness to the territory.