Sub Cam

3/3/2006 9:19:00 AM


"Cancer Deaths Drive Band to Succeed"

Tova Fruchtman
Staff Writer

At Thanksgiving dinner this year, Jackie Fletcher, a member of Snellville’s Temple Beth David, played her guests the music her two sons are making with their respective bands. They say she often plays their songs for her friends and has come to support them at performances while they try to make it in the music world.

Isaac Fletcher remembers writing songs while sitting in high school math class. He didn’t have a band to play them with and didn’t know that he ever would, but he couldn’t keep himself from writing them.

“All I could think about was writing music,” Fletcher said. “I thought at the time, ‘There is a reason that I’m doing this.’ ”

Writing music wasn’t novel for his family.

Isaac and his brother, Brad, started playing guitar about the same time.

Brad was about 13. Isaac was 10. And unlike the typical teenage boy who picks up the guitar only long enough to learn a few songs off the radio alone in his bedroom, the Fletchers never put them down.

Brad, 25, is part of a three-piece band called Resurgence. He handles the guitar and vocals. Kyle Edson is on bass, and Elliot Griffiths plays drums.

Isaac, 22, is part of Suburban Camouflage, a band that started about four years ago when the four members, including fellow Temple Beth David member Jacob Lehman, were seniors in high school at Brookwood High School in Snellville. Isaac and Lehman share guitar and vocal duties. Michael Ely plays bass, and Eric Hodges is on drums.

In some ways, Brad said, their love for music is genetic.

“Our dad played music his whole life, since he was 15 years old,” said Brad, who added that their father, Doug Fletcher, never pushed music on them. “He left it up to us. … He’s my major influence as far as getting into music.”

The boys would go watch their father play with his friends when they were growing up, but it wasn’t until the two began writing their own songs that they realized the role music could play in their lives.

“Once I connected music with self-expression … I could channel out how I felt and take it into melodies, write it into either guitar riffs or vocals,” Isaac said. “I could express myself in a way that I could never do. … There’s not words for how you feel sometimes. With music I could get it out.”

When their dad died of cancer in November 2004, the boys turned to music to help them deal with the loss.

“It is a form of therapy,” Brad said about writing music. “It releases your aggression and thoughts and allows you to express yourself.”

Lehman understands the importance of music as an outlet. Although he and Eric went to school together, they didn’t become close friends and start playing together until they were in the same confirmation class at Beth David. Lehman lived at the Fletcher house when Doug was sick, and he lost his mother to cancer when he was 9.

“Music is the only way for me to express the things I’ve felt and been through,” Lehman said. “Talking to other people doesn’t really fill the void. Playing music is the only way for me to express how I really feel and to share with people who listen a moment in my life, real things.”

He said the fact that he and the Fletchers have lost a parent to cancer helps them understand why music is so important to one another.

“It definitely brings us closer together,” Lehman said. “We can all relate to each other.”

“I guess I stuck with it because I just feel like that’s what I’m here to do,” Isaac said. “I don’t really know any other way to put it. The way that I feel when I play music, nothing else can recapture that.”

Brad also feels compelled to play music.

“I just have an uncontrollable drive to do so,” he said. “It’s an artistic outlet. … It releases something that a person can’t release another way.”

Isaac said their father’s dream of being a musician strengthens his desire to make it in the music world. “He’s looking down, loving it, because he never got to come see us play,” he said. “It inspires me to do it for myself, for my band and everything, but for him too because I know he’d be proud. I want to be able do something he wasn’t able to do, but I’m sure he’d love for us to be able to do.”

That dream is beginning to come true for both bands.

“Every show that we play now, whether it be Athens or Atlanta, there’s always people that we know, but at the same time I’m starting to see a lot of new faces, which is really cool,” Isaac said. “Just the progression from four years ago to now … we’re just even more ambitious now to get out there to see it become a reality.”

The Fletchers and Lehman say their hope is to get as many people as possible to listen to their music.

“We want to create music that people can relate to,” Lehman said.


- Tova Fruchtman