Two fathers, two sons and one debut single from Dexter, Michigan

Featured image: © Cynthia Pulford

Title: Other Spaces
Artist: Strawberry Lake
Release Date: 2026-11-02
Genres: Indie Pop, Power Pop
Label: self-release
Description: Strawberry Lake, two father and son duos from Dexter, Michigan, debut with Other Spaces, out November 2. Retrofuturista premiere.

The band Strawberry Lake has four members and two surnames. Martin Fletcher sings, his son Carter Fletcher plays bass, Jim Pulford is on drums, and his son Cole Pulford plays guitar and sings backing vocals. They come from Dexter, a small community in southeastern Michigan. This premiere for Retrofuturista is their first single, “Other Spaces”, available digitally since November 2.

The plan belonged to Jim’s son Gage. He wanted to bring together the fathers of his friends, several of them musicians, and have them play. On June 26, 2022, Gage died in a car accident in the early morning, three weeks after he graduated from high school. Jim and Martin, already friends, then started playing together and brought their sons in. The group has since written songs and played venues in Ann Arbor and Detroit over the past few years.

“Other Spaces” follows someone trying to leave their troubles behind through nightlife, emotional highs and other distractions, and finding the troubles waiting afterwards. At the centre is an on-and-off relationship between two people who want to be close but struggle to talk, feel lonely, and are unsure whether they can count on each other. The song sets imagined closeness against actual isolation and ends on the idea that letting go may be the only way forward.

Martin Fletcher says it began with a sense of conflict in a relationship and the question of what was going on, and that it is partly about how pointless conflicts are. He describes it as one of the songs writers call gifts, written in ten or fifteen minutes, with the remaining work being editing and polishing. He also says he once found it pretentious when songwriters claimed songs came to them, and now thinks that few of our thoughts are fully our own.

The guitars ring out cleanly, and the raspy vocal gives them something to push against, which works well. The hooks land early and stay, and the melodies have room to breathe without losing their grip. The roughness in the playing sounds earned, and it gives the song its backbone.

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