Couples Working Together – Jenna and Steve Nagy (Massalina Cargo)

ABOUT MUSIC AND MAGIC

Jenna and Steve have been married for 18 years and live in Lynn Haven and have a 15 year old son, Stevie. Steve is a law enforce- ment offi cer at the Bay County Sheriff’s offi ce and Jenna is a pharmaceutical rep. The two are better known as Massalina Cargo, the music duo that can set a mellow evening ablaze with emotion. They describe their music as “a blend of easy-listening songs you know and some Mass Cargo originals”.

PCL: How did you meet?

Jenna: We were set up on a blind date by his youngest brother who was dating my best friend. We both had just come out of bad relationships and both did not really want to meet anybody. Everyone kept insisting that we had a lot in common and should meet. <to Steve> Should I tell about the Magic? Ok, so we finally met by chance at a club and he was about to leave and turned around and while he exited the door he looked back at me and our eyes locked. And I am not kidding, I felt ”wow, zing”. There was something going on in that split second.

Steve: Yes, there was an instant connection. It was one of those weird sensations; I knew I was in trouble right when it happened. Steve: We went on a daytime date and we ended up downtown at Leitz Music. Until then I had never heard her music and I am six years older than her so my music and where I come from is a bit different than hers. She had the traditional classical training. I grabbed a guitar and started playing and I knew I had her then. That was pretty magical.

Jenna: I sat down and started playing the piano for him and thought “This is really fun” – being with somebody who loved music just as much as I do.

Steve: I was with the Florida Marine Patrol full time back then.

Jenna: He is a Co-Commander of the beach precinct right now, he is a lieutenant… looking at him with a smile “I am proud of you…”

Steve: But our real love that we share is for music. I tell everybody that if I could sing like her then I would never have had a real job. She was still going to school back then. Jenna: Music was my passion and although I studied opera, all I wanted to do was play Rock ‘n Roll. I left my studies for a full time job in the music industry in Nashville but when my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer I decided to come back home while she went through treatment. FSU had just opened here and I finished my degree in communications here.

Steve: And then three years after getting married, our son Stevie was born. He became the most important part of our lives. We want to make sure we give him the best life we can. Jenna has been the giant dreamer and I am the safety net. There is a balance that we had to strike and we both like to dream big but we will never put the music before our child and our marriage. They come first.

Jenna: That’s what fascinates me about Steve.  He learned by ear. He can take a song and not only know the particular key, but he also knows where the capo was placed on the guitar neck, what position it was played in, if they had done some kind of crazy tuning where they have dropped strings, just by hearing it… I don’t have that. It fascinates me. He has a spiritual gift. I can write songs but I don’t have all that. A few years ago I decided I wanted to play instruments, too during our act and start accompanying myself. We eventually added a keyboard, and Steve taught me how to play guitar. Plus, when he was playing solos he needed a person to keep the rhythm. So again we went down to Leitz Music and I bought my fi rst guitar. Talk about impatient… I wanted to play right away and it was tough and my fingers were raw, but I did it.

Steve: Yes, the only problem was, she wanted to play “now”, live on stage “right now”. It took her only three weeks to get on stage and accompany me. It was bumpy, I have to admit but she did it. (Steve grinning) What we did is we had to turn my guitar volume up just a bit and hers down… the great thing was, when I made a mistake then I could always blame her. (both laughing)

PCL: But Steve stayed patient?

Jenna: Yes, you wouldn’t believe…. That shows how we can work together… well, when we practice…

Steve: It’s bumpy…

Jenna: Well, it’s either utopia, like “magic, chill bumps” or it’s on the other end of the spectrum where we are arguing “you are going too fast” “no, you are going too slow”

Steve: So, usually what happens is I do my work on the song first and then show it to her and she will plug her parts in and we bump our way through it and within an hour, depending on the difficulty, we will have it and we get really excited. Because, you know, it’s a challenge to keep people coming to listen to our music and come up with something original and do all that in our spare time. We do not want to keep playing the same songs over and over and are trying to add to the list, so it’s very demanding but we are very rewarded, too – we have a good following and the majority of nights we are playing are good nights. Every now and then we get a night where we think “that was work” but most of the time it’s really about connecting with people… we will be looking around at the listeners and after- wards I will ask Jenna things like “did you see that lady, she had tears in her eyes?”. Yes, we like to get paid and want to make a living but it is really about connecting with people. If the music that we play touches them then that inspires us.

Jenna: It feeds us! Our favorite thing is a night that we played and sang very well, where we connected with great people, and at the end of the night we go home TOGETHER but before going home we have our ‘special ritual’ after each gig: After just having played at an exquisite restaurant or wonderfully catered event, where we were offered anything to eat and drink that we possibly could have wanted and refusing it while we were working, then we’re STARVING at the end of the night, we run through Taco Bell and ‘feast’ together. The point is, this is our time together after our idea of a ‘perfect night’, where we are close and can talk about things that happened during the performance and we will laugh at each other for the mistakes we made and talk about the fun and cool moments… that brings us even closer together.

Steve: A lot of people are going on dates or to the movies or dinner on Friday nights. On our Friday nights we are playing music together and in the end we get the coolest date night there is! A lot of people come up and tell us ‘you know how lucky you guys are that you can do this together?” And we don’t take that for granted. We know it is special.

Jenna: Yes, and our friends are there and our family and there are new people coming up who like what we do. It feels very special.

PCL: Are there any strengths and weak- nesses that you have as a couple when being together?

Jenna: This is actually really funny. A lot of times, in the middle of playing a song, we will both kind of day dream at the exact same spot and BOTH miss the same chord. We will look at each other like ‘are you kidding me’? and we have to laugh.

PCL: Were there any tough times that you had to go through?

Jenna: Last year our son had a neurological problem following sinus surgery. He developed chronic severe pain and it was a devastating time. He finally received help at a hospital in Gainesville where the offending nerves were treated with radiofrequency ablation. It took 6 months out of our lives.

Steve: The music stopped.

Jenna: We were freaking out. Stevie is our world – all that mattered was to get him well again. He could not go back to school for the last half of the year. But he is well now and we are so grateful. To watch our child suffer took a part out of me and replaced it with something else. I realized how short life is. God gave us gifts and we should be using and sharing them. We have decided to open a music lesson studio in 2014 called “Sessions with Massalina Cargo”. We will be teaching voice, piano and guitar to both children and adults. I’m a former piano teacher, and we have volunteered the past 3 years with the Bay Education Foundation’s Arts Alive event and had the honor of working with students already. And it has been so rewarding to see the kids excel. We plan to write more original music and teach students right here in our music room. Our ultimate goals are to have a CD
produced and expand our playing to regional festivals, and we are trying to convince our son Stevie to join the band. He plays the piano and is very talented.

Steve: In the end it is all about meeting and inspiring people. Our families are both here and they all support us, they come to the concerts. It is rare that my parents are not there. My brother Danny is a coach at Mosely High and they go to all his games and try to be at all our concerts, too.

PCL: What are your tips for other couples who might be going through a hard time?

Jenna: Our big thing is that we don’t pick on each other, we don’t tease in a negative way – we know the hot button items and we avoid them. If I know that if I would do something that will upset him, well then I am not going to do it. I don’t say things with an attitude, either.

Steve: We’ve both learned. And in every marriage over time, if you don’t take care of it properly, you develop resentments. If you don’t fi gure out what those resentments are then they live inside of you and they will grow. If you don’t get rid of that and work it out, individually and as a couple, then it just grows and eventually you collide somewhere. I think many divorces happen because people don’t address issues as they are happening. Maybe they are afraid. We addressed things and we asked ourselves, ‘what’s the most important thing?’ and we both grew from that. Our marriage is the best it has ever been, even better than when we fi rst met. I would part of it to us being still crazy about each other, even now after being married for many years.

Jenna: It’s like tending to a garden. You have to weed it, cultivate it, till the ground, fertilize it. We have to nurture this relationship, we have to communicate.

Steve: We got better at apologizing. Sometimes even apologize if you aren’t sure if you are supposed to. You can solve problems pretty quickly like that. That doesn’t mean let someone run you over but you work things out together. If Jenna is upset about something, well that throws me off as well. We have been through some rough spots but we have never done anything unforgivable. We have always forgiven each other. We manage to overcome things. Other than Stevie being sick, it’s been a great relationship. We have done a lot together and we are having great experiences together.

Jenna: We are living our dreams – having goals and seeing them come to fruition, playing on stage together and with other musicians, having the opportunity for bigger crowds. We still have dreams. I am learning to make decisions to say ‘no’ to certain things so that we can really enjoy these next chapters of our lives together, spending time doing what we love to do.

Steve: We still think we will write that one hit song. But I am the breaks – ’dream big live safe’ is what I like to say.

Jenna: He is the practical one, he will be telling me ‘you are dreaming way too big right now’ – and in the end, what matters to us is that we want to be really good at what we do.

Interview by Val Schoger