The Tennessean, Nashville, TN 7/30/04

DAVIDSON A.M.

Davidson Personalities

Joywood roots inspire songwriter

New album named for Nashville neighborhood

By Lee Ann O'Neal
Staff Writer

All these things they make up a life
And life is good
All these things they make up a home
And home…..
Home's in Joywood

So goes the chorus of the title track of Joywood, released earlier this year by singer Joe Pagetta.

Couched south of Trinity Lane and east of Dickerson Pike, anchored at an end by the former Tom Joy school building and the other by a brick mansion shrouded in magnolia trees, is the Joywood neighborhood that inspired the music.

"It hasn't been gentrified," he said, comparing it to the nearby neighborhoods in east Nashville.

And it's a neighborhood that the songwriter says has been forgotten.

The pop/folk rock artist weaves themes of place and space throughout the album.

Appropriate since the songs were born out of Pagetta's home studio, where he has a clear view of the neighborhood-the 50's-style houses split into duplexes, the sidewalks that mysteriously stop on one side of the road, and then start up again on the other side, and the people who live there, like Mrs. Betty.

"There was a connection to the neighborhood. I don't think I could have written these songs if I lived somewhere else."

"Mrs. Betty" Mathis has lived in the neighborhood since the early '50s.
The neighborhood was named for the Joy family, Mathis said, which owned the local florist and "had their own homes down the street, had big brick houses and all."

"They all began to get old and died. There's not any of them living around here how," she said.

As Pagetta wrote the album, the neighborhood took on more significance for his music.

As he began working on the tracks a few years ago, he started thinking more about the area, the beer bottles he sometimes picked up in the street, the 1989 Oldsmobile that found its way back to him after he sold it. Place became as important as the words and rhythm.

Lyrics of Joywood, the title track, chronicles a home with a hissing radiator, a flooding basement and a testy screen door.

The song is "about living in a house that's falling apart," Pagetta says with a touch of irony. "At the same time, it's home."

Equally important to the development of the music has been Pagetta's own experience. It's not necessarily autobiographical, he said, and the songs usually take the form of analogies.

Running as an undercurrent throughout the album is the theme of reconciliation - the shabby house with a sense of comfort in Joywood, the dwelling with all its warts and worn-out places or the life experience that isn't flawless but brings us to a place of peace just the same.

The idea is, "I may have struggled with things as a kid or a teenager. It's a really nice moment in life" when you can say, "You know, I turned out OK," the 32-year-old said.

"You've reconciled the present with the past, and you realize they balance out," he said.

Mathis says Joywood is different from when she first moved there.

"We got a lot of people that's moved in that's not as, you know, from out-of-town, and from different areas of town, and it's not as friendly like it used to be. Used to be everybody knew everybody.

"It's a nice neighborhood," she said. "I wouldn't trade it for any of the rest of them."

Copyright © 2004 The Tennessean