Siddhartha Khosla is the multi Emmy-nominated composer in contention this year for Only Murders in the Building. Here, he talks about how New York as a city inspired the sound of the opening title score, the real joy of creating the music for the almost silent episode of Only Murders in the Building, and how Emmy nominations — even after getting them four years in a row — is still exciting.
Awards Daily: How did you get involved with Only Murders in the Building?
Siddhartha Khosla: I had worked with Dan Fogelman, the creator of This is Us, for six seasons now and finished the show with the sixth season. Dan is also one of the main producers of Only Murders in the Building and he introduced me to John Hoffman, who is the showrunner. So John, Dan, and a few of the producers and I had a Zoom call early in the pandemic, and I met John Hoffman through there. I played him some pieces of music that I had been writing, not actually in anticipation of that meeting but I had just been generally writing around that time. And we just hit it off. He liked what I was writing and then I got the job on the show.
Awards Daily: I read you started scoring for TV and film while also being in your band Goldspot. What made you want to take on that extra work?
Siddhartha Khosla: It wasn’t taking on extra work as much as it was taking on any work. My band Goldspot had been touring, and we had been signed to a record deal with Mercury UK. We were out in the UK touring and living what you think is this glamorous rock band life, but it wasn’t really that glamorous. And in that time two things were happening simultaneously, the advent of streaming taking over the music business in 2005-2006, and right then our record was coming out and the record didn’t do that well frankly. It had gotten lots of buzz but it didn’t really sell the units. It was a moment of like, okay, the industry is changing but I still want to make records so I left the UK and came back to New York and I made my own solo record with Goldspot. Around that time Dan Fogelman actually called me, asking me to score the second season of his television show The Neighbors on ABC. After much thought I said let’s try it and see what this is. I had been writing songs for commercials and did some spots for Target and Google, so I wanted to see if this is for me and I think it is for me.
Awards Daily: How much of the opening animation were you able to see before creating the opening title music?
Siddhartha Khosla: A lot of things happened simultaneously. The title house was creating their picture. I knew that it was going to be animated, but I hadn’t seen anything to be honest. All I was doing was writing and finishing this piece and I would just send the music to producers and they would send it back with notes for me to get it across the finish line just as a piece of music. I had no idea that it would end up being the title sequence song, you just don’t know what it is going to be used for. Then I started seeing the title sequence and we put up this piece of music against it and it was generally working but it still needed tweaking more to really really match the build of the picture. Because the picture really builds, it is pretty dynamic. You see these beautiful images over Amy Ryan’s name, then you see the night sky as it pans across the building and it starts feeling a little bit more intense in the back half. Then there is that beautiful shot as we pull away and you see the backs of Charles, Oliver, and Mabel over the title card Only Murders in the Building. There was just a lot of tweaking I had to do after the fact, building it out with more orchestra. But I think a lot of the conversation around the piece of music had just been developed on its own while the title house was working on the picture.
Awards Daily: I read that for that title scene you used upside down buckets as drums. What inspired that?
Siddhartha Khosla: There is so much wonderful thought that goes into the decisions of every single detail that we put into the music of the show. As I am sure other departments like costumes and production design do. One of the producers asked, how do we make the main title scene more New York, make it tougher? So thinking about all that stuff, my team and I were thinking it through and in that conversation we talked about how New York is this socio- economically diverse place. Maybe one of the most socio-economic in the sense that you could be walking down the street, you look one way and someone has a Prada purse and is driving a fancy car, then you look to the right and there is a homeless person. There is this dichotomy of rich and poor in New York just like there is inside the Arconia. It’s a pre-war building. You have people who were maybe grandfathered into their rents and can afford to live there, and there are also people who are incredibly wealthy who live in that building. So that’s when we came up with this idea of, what if we had all the drums and percussions played by street musicians? What would that feel like? Then it led us to deciding on Home Depot buckets and James McAlister, my drummer, got the buckets and set up a drum kit. There may have been some pans and pots as well, and just layered those drums in and it was like the final glue that we needed.
Awards Daily: With your dramatic score nomination the episode is silent for the most part in terms of dialogue. Did that change the way you approached your music?
Siddhartha Khosla: Well, I think the difference was that the music was really, really under the microscope. Throughout the season it serves as an underscore supporting the story and sometimes really driving the story, but here there was no dialogue in that entire episode and so every note, every nuance, every sound was heard. That was something where it was critical in terms of where we put music and where we didn’t. Why would we have music here and why would we not want it here. It was a really wonderful collaboration with Julie Monroe who edited that episode, and she and I worked really closely together in terms of where we wanted the music. But she and I worked really well on that and I am very proud of it. It is such an artful episode, you do not get that opportunity that often to do something so outside the box and creative and artful. The entire episode is told from the perspective of Theo Dimas who is deaf, and so the music was underscoring Theo’s emotional state throughout a lot of it. The mystery he was privy to. It was all from Theo’s vantage point and so it was an incredibly challenging and rewarding experience being part of that episode.
Awards Daily: This is the fourth year in a row that you have been nominated at the Emmys. Has the experience of getting nominated changed for you?
Siddhartha Khosla: No, it still surprises the hell out of me! I am still in shock when I get nominated. I am just floored that the Television Academy has thought so highly of the music and what is really exciting is the things I have been nominated for are things that I am incredibly proud of, well before any awards conversation. Just like the silent episode of Only Murders in the Building. When I finished working on it I wasn’t thinking about awards stuff I was thinking of how proud I was to be part of this. And I hope people get to experience and see how artful this episode is. Not just what I am doing but the whole thing. So when you get noticed for it it feels good. Because it feels like people actually paid attention to a really artful moment in television. That is a very encouraging thing, and there is so much incredible work that is out there. I am in awe of so many composers that I am nominated alongside, and even the ones who didn’t get nominations, there is so much great work out there being done and so to even be put into this conversation is mind blowing to me.
Awards Daily: Do you have any other projects that you are working on? Are you already working on season three of Only Murders in the Building?
Siddhartha Khosla: Season three has been picked up and I will probably start working on it sometime this fall. I have an idea of where we are headed so I need to start writing some thematic material for it. Then I am working on a new show called Welcome to Chippendales for Hulu, which is going to be awesome. Kumail Nanjiani is playing Somen Banerjee, this Indian immigrant who comes to the US and is responsible for starting Chippendales. It is a crazy, crazy, dramatic dark story that I cannot wait for people to see. So we are deep in that now. I am also doing a new series called Rabbit Hole for Paramount that starts Kiefer Sutherland. Then I also have a new movie coming out called Your Place or Mine directed by Aline Brosh McKenna. It is a romantic comedy film starring Reese Witherspoon and Ashton Kutcher, which I think comes out next year because we just finished it.
Awards Daily: Any final thoughts?
Siddhartha Khosla: I am just really appreciative of all the support that Only Murders in the Building has gotten. I was also nominated for a song this year from This is Us, an original song that I wrote with Taylor Goldsmith. So I am just grateful for all the love and support.
