His Greatest Love of All. Songwriter Michael Masser gave up a successful Wall Street career to be true to his creative spirit

MICHAEL MASSER is a creative artist whose thoughts swirl with hit songs waiting to be written down. ``When I hear music now, it doesn't go away too fast in my mind,'' he says, thrusting a silver spoon into a bowl of hot oatmeal at 2 p.m. ``Sometimes it takes days..., or, if I get in the studio and get intense, the song will stay with me forever....''

Songwriting for Mr. Masser is listening to that internal voice and turning it into words and notes that touch people.

You realize this when you look around the high-ceilinged living room at gold and platinum records: ``Touch Me in the Morning'' and ``Theme from Mahogany'' (Diana Ross); ``Tonite I Celebrate My Love'' (Roberta Flack); ``Didn't We Almost Have It All'' and ``Saving All My Love'' (Whitney Houston); ``The Greatest Love of All'' (George Benson). Perhaps a dozen more.

Question: Where does the inspiration for all these songs come from?

``It can keep you up at night,'' says Masser. ``So I guess I'm reaching that place where I'm pretty vulnerable to it. It's a double-edged sword. At one point, though, I was breaking in, and I wasn't as open, perhaps, emotionally, and as sensitive - like, I became the things I was running from.

``What I've done - I've become more abstract, I think.''

Welcome to the non-linear musical mind of ex-Manhattan stockbroker Michael Masser. If the apparent anarchy of his explanation suggests a bit of eccentricity, remember that song list of more hits than you can shake a Grammy at. How he does it is hard for him to describe, but his more-hits-than-misses musical marksmanship suggests that his risk-taking and unorthodoxy are more than mere creative whimsy.

``Michael is one of the major forces in music today because of his uncanny ability to build melodies and harmonies,'' says David Chackler, the chief executive officer of Sounds of Film, a film-music supervising group. ``His success will continue way into the future, because he pushes at boundaries. He's an iconoclast. He breaks the mold.''

``What's amazing about [Masser] is that he only writes a few songs a year, but he has such a high percentage of hits,'' says Barbara Babchick, a songwriter and executive assistant at Goldcastle Records. ``Others write hundreds and can't come close to that percentage.''

Masser's is the story of a successful career man and family man who used to ride his bike through Manhattan traffic to his office - but not before stopping off at a Juilliard music school practice room to doodle away on the piano. And it is the story of a self-taught musician, who talks less about how to write melodies and harmonies than about how to be honest, original, and true.

``Somehow people get very nervous about leaving the comfortable life of rules behind,'' he says, ``and never take the chance to develop their own internal voice, to listen to their own consciousness.''

Getting Masser to explain the technical side of constructing a song is nearly impossible. He goes to one of the two concert-size Yamaha grands in his mansion and begins pounding out chords. He speaks of stream of consciousness, instincts, dramatics, ``the music passing through me.'' Soon you are aware that creativity - at least this kind of creativity - defies explanation. SUFFICE it to say a thorough grounding in piano theory - self-instructed or otherwise - is requisite, though not the ability to read music. The rest is letting what is inside come out, keeping it honest, and following no one else's rules.

Masser says he prefers to work on an acoustic piano late at night; his method of composing does not include electronic gadgetry. ``People simply learn to process information to the point where it doesn't serve true creativity,'' he says.

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