Winnetka Bowling League released their debut album, Sha La La, last month through Local Weather/ MDDN Records and today, the band shares another taste of their nostalgic pop sound with “This Is Life,” featuring friends Medium Build and Dawes. Winnetka Bowling League’s frontman Matthew Koma is never one to pass up an opportunity to inject humor into both his art and life in general. Koma’s story of how this song came to life is no exception: “There was this song going kind of viral on TikTok called ‘Rectangular’ and it was at the same time I started seeing videos of Medium Build / Nick in his signature shorts / dangling earring / swooning the internet with his passionate and relatable observations on the weird life experience.”
The artist adds: “I was poking a little fun when I posted a Tiktok dressed as Nick, performing ‘Rectangular’, and we became fast internet buddies. On his next trip to LA we hung out at my studio and he noticed the Dawes poster on my wall….we bonded over our extreme fandom of Dawes and Taylor’s songwriting. I sent Taylor some of Medium Build’s music and he loved it, weeks later covering his song ‘In My Room’ at a show where Nick was in attendance.”
Koma continues with: I had started a little nugget of a first verse with ‘This Is Life’ and sent it to our group chat seeing if they’d be down to complete the love circle with a musical gesture and, lucky for me, they were down. Taylor is our hero and I can’t (but will) speak for Nick when I say this is one of the coolest moments of our lives to be on a song with him.”
Dawes’s Taylor Goldsmith adds: “There’s a Joan Didion quote from her novel ‘The Last Thing He Wanted’ that hit me hard enough to take up permanent residence in my notebook: ‘When I look back on what happened I see mainly fragments, flashes, a momentary phantasmagoria in which everyone focused on some different aspect and nobody at all saw the whole.’ It’s how most of life seems to feel all of the time. And Matt nailed it when he wrote that first verse of ‘This Is Life.’ It’s an ambitious title, and he fully delivered on the premise.”
Medium Build chimes in with: “When I first met Matt from WBL we gushed about Taylor from Dawes. He told me they were friends. I didn’t believe him until he got me free Dawes tickets. Then he sent me this song and said me and Taylor were gonna write on it. I didn’t believe him but here we are. Point is yall should believe Matt Koma. This song fucking rocks.”
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