Maxwell Feinstein is on a roll.

With the release of a new single this week, hot on the heels of his long-awaited solo EP “BetaMax” earlier this month, the ubiquitous and well-liked Hoboken scenester takes a huge step into the limelight after spending over a decade as a sideman, session musician and behind-the-scenes producer.

But what makes this story special isn’t Feinstein’s achievements but the fact that they’re coming almost exactly 10 years after a serious medical condition threatened not only to end his ability to play music, but also his life.

“I was born with a bleeding disorder called hemophilia, and it has affected me in a variety of ways,” Feinstein said, speaking publicly about his disease for the first time. “It affected me physically, yes, but it also meant that psychologically I had very little trust in my own body for a very long time.”

Hemophiliacs’ blood does not clot normally, and the disease makes those who have it much more prone to serious injury. It attacks the body in a variety of ways.

“In my life, I’ve literally injured my elbow by lining up and simply making a pool shot,'' Feinstein said. "I once injured my ankle by just walking on it. These are the kind of things that happen. When I was on tour with BWQ, I had a nosebleed for two weeks. There are just a lot of little things that happen that might not be life-threatening but that became a constant presence and burden on my life.”

In 2005, Feinstein developed what’s called a target joint in his right elbow.

“One of the things that happens with hemophilia is that you bleed into your joints,” he explained. “It got so bad that I would get injured if I so much breathed on my elbow, and by 2009, it just got sore one day and wouldn’t go away. It shortened my patience with the world, and I entered into this world of constant physical pain that I didn’t understand.”

Feinstein eventually consulted a specialist in Manhattan who showed him two X-rays.

“You see this X-ray, this is the elbow of an 80-year-old woman, and there’s damage but there’s a little bit of cartilage here,” he recalled the doctor saying. “Now, this X-ray is yours. There’s no cartilage left at all. There’s nothing there.”

At one point, the muscles had atrophied to the point where Feinstein could wrap his hand around his tricep and his fingers would meet.

“It was surreal,” he recalled. “It got to the point where I couldn’t think of what it would be like not to be in pain.”

At that point, around 2010, Feinstein quit the band he had been playing in -- “not just because of the arthritis, but because the relationship with the singer was terrible,” he noted.

“At the time, the politics of music in Hoboken was very territorial and very insular,'' he said. "From an early age, I just wanted to play with everyone. I wanted to show up and do whatever I wanted. I just wanted to be that guy who got to play with everyone, and a lot of people didn’t like that. So I started doing other things, and it allowed me to find my own path.”

The journey back meant that Feinstein had to learn how to do things – including play the guitar – that put as little stress on his right arm as possible.

“I still have pain, and it’s still difficult for me to do a lot of things, but I’m not in arresting pain all the time, that’s the difference,” Feinstein said. “I had to relearn how to play guitar completely. There was a year when I basically didn’t gig. The next year it got a little better, and I started playing my guitar very low so I barely had to bend my right arm. I kept active, to be sure, but for a couple of years, I wasn’t sure if I was going to be able to keep playing.”

The young Max Feinstein spent his childhood in Montclair and moved to Hoboken with his family at age 14. After brief flirtations with a variety of wind and string instruments in elementary school, Feinstein picked up the guitar at age 11.

“It all clicked for me in seventh grade, in Spanish class of all places,” Feinstein said. “We were asked to take some words in Spanish and put them over a song we liked. A couple of kids fumblingly played the chords to ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ while some other kids sang some words in Spanish, and something about the fact that kids my age could actually play music just really hit me. This is big, I thought to myself. Just the idea that we were capable of making that kind of noise was a revelation. I really didn’t know how any of that worked before that moment.”

Feinstein started playing in bands by high school, but his career didn’t exactly take off immediately.

“We were around when the original Maxwell’s was still there, but we had a huge problem getting in,” Feinstein said. “It was a time when every bar in New Jersey got really strict about enforcing the legal drinking age, and I had to negotiate my way in to every show I wanted to see. Playing was even worse. I couldn’t really gig in town until I was 21. We mostly played on Long Island.”

Feinstein played in Hoboken bands with Alice Genese’s son Jesse and Gene “D. Plumber” Turonis’ daughter Emily, and he participated in fundraising shows for a student-run newsletter at The Hudson School.

“I understand the legacy of those shows endures, and I had the distinction of playing the first original song at one of them,” Feinstein said. “There wasn’t a whole lot of space in that school so you just set up shop and played music anywhere you could find, and for my friends and I, that was the handicapped bathroom on the fourth floor. That room was popular for a lot of things, including making out, but you just put up with whoever else was in there and did your thing while they did theirs.”

These days, happily, Feinstein can do his thing as much as he wants, which means gigging regularly with Jersey City’s Debra Devi, producing bands at his Silverhorse Studios in Hoboken and taking part in open mics and music community events.

“My doctor says that the improvement I’ve had in my arm is something he sees with one out of 500 patients,” Feinstein said. “It’s absolutely humbling. I’m still not where I should be, and I’ve had a chip on my shoulder my whole life about this. But there was a moment in 2013 when I realized that my arm didn’t hurt all the time anymore, and it actually surprised me. I was 25 years old and it was a miracle to not be in constant pain anymore. I never thought that I’d be able to play with the faculty I do.

"It’s really impressed me that the stature I’ve achieved in the local music community and the release of the new EP and single just happened to coincide with this 10-year benchmark, all of that is a happy coincidence and it’s really given me the confidence to focus on myself as a performer, a leader of a band, a lead singer, as opposed to being a facilitator for other people’s music.”

The “BetaMax” EP was released under the aegis of Mike Kuzan’s The Latest Noise collective. It’s an eclectic three-song EP that segues from the effects-laden experimentalism of “Drone” to the pastoral indie rock of “Spratz” to the introspective “Shade of the Trees.”

This week, Feinstein will also self-release “Annie’s Gone,” a ukulele-driven ballad about the loss of Feinstein’s mother.

Both releases are available on all digital streaming sites.

On Saturday, Oct. 19, Feinstein and some friends will recreate the music of rock pranksters Ween at the annual Ghost of Uncle Joe’s Halloween fundraiser at the Historic Jersey City & Harsimus Cemetery.