Only Murders In The Music Studio: An Interview With Siddhartha Khosla
Yes, those are Home Depot buckets in the main title
Only Murders In The Building is stacked on contradictions. It is a fictional take on the true-crime genre, it pairs Selena Gomez with Steve Martin and Martin Short, and it’s a quirky comedy that both starts and ends with someone getting murdered. It seems fitting then, that its theme song is a mixture of genres, styles, and even instruments. To learn more about the creative process behind the music, I sat down with composer Siddhartha Khosla.
*This interview has been edited for length and clarity
So I wanted to talk about your process for writing the theme song of Only Murders In The Building. Specifically, I think the first thing that hits me about it is the mix of vocal and instrumental parts, do you want to talk about that a little bit?
Yeah, I think on the main title theme, or just anything in general, a lot of it comes from me being a singer. I started my career as a singer/songwriter of a band called Goldspot, so the voice is a very natural and easy instrument for me to compose on. I tend to hum and sing along when I’m writing something, and oftentimes the producers or directors I’m working with, they’re like, “Oh, can we get that in there too?” So on the main title [for OMITB], I was originally thinking that it was going to be a large choir. I wanted an inner-city youth choir to sing that main title. That was my dream scenario in the beginning, and then there were sort of budgetary restrictions on getting that done and doing stuff like that, and so for a period I just as a placeholder, had my voice in there. I was also using a Beatles-esque mellotron and there were some small vocal samples there as well.
I combined those with my voice as sort of a placeholder until we got the choir, and then when I laid it down, I think we all were like, “That’s it.” Obviously, there was part of me that wanted to keep on tweaking and getting it to where I had initially had envisioned it, but I also stepped back and said, “Wait a minute, this is really connecting and working for everybody, let’s not mess it up.” And so we did that thing that a lot of people don’t do sometimes which is that if there is magic in the demo and there is something there that viscerally connects with people, you leave it. So in the main title theme, you have my voice, you have mellotron vocals, and there’s also a bassoon doubling it and strings doubling it since I think there was a realization early on that this was a really strong hook and so let’s have more people playing.
I feel like one of the cool things about it, which you’ve mentioned, is that it keeps building and it keeps gaining momentum and it almost parallels how the plot of the show is structured. Did you know the plot of the show going into it or did they just give you more of a general idea?
I had no idea what the plot was until I started seeing early cuts of episodes, so for me, it was very cool because the thing about this show was the collaboration between myself and John Hoffman who created it, and Steve Martin, Dan Fogelman, Jess Rosenthal, and Jamie Babbit our producers and directors. I think we all “got” the show and I think that was what the magic was, it was like lightning in a bottle working on this show, honestly. The second I read that script I was like, “This has a magic to it.” And so it was like when you get inspired by something you just go off and try and a bunch of stuff. No one asked me to but I went and wrote a bunch of music right away, and a lot of that music stayed and became things that scenes were built around in the edit.
The music sort of became another limb of the show in a way. When I was trying all of this stuff out in my head, I wanted to sort lean on the majesty of The Arconia in the score. I wanted it to be this big orchestral sound and I wanted it to have that sort of weight to it and score the show like it was some sort of prestige drama. Just by virtue of using some of that bigger orchestra, I could get it to be really big and epic, and so to your point, the drama of the score had been there from the beginning. And so when the show started unraveling and more and more stuff started to happen, it just made sense that we had taken this route with the music.
Did you have any specific musical inspirations that you were pulling from when you were creating it?
You know, what really helped me was early on in the pandemic, productions paused, and I work on a bunch of different shows and films and productions stopped everywhere for a while. When that happened I thought, “Oh you know, let me mess around with my own hand at a modern classical record.” And I didn’t go to school for music, I didn’t go to school for anything orchestral, so my knowledge of music comes from me being in bands and playing and writing and listening and sort of evolving in that way.
During the pandemic, I started writing modern classic pieces, and the people that really influenced me in that were people like Phillip Glass and maybe more classical older composers like Eric Satie. Huge, big time. So I was trying to do my own thing but I was admiring the beauty of Satie’s piano work and it really moved me, so I was listening to that a lot during the pandemic. When I got the gig for the show, I sort of continued that thought so it was almost like I had inadvertently been practicing for the show and I had no idea. In terms of influences, I would just say I’m emotionally moved by Phillip Glass and Eric Satie on a classical level.
On more of a modern level, which is like the main title, it’s actually a very different sound than the rest of the show. The main title almost feels like a song or something, it’s just like a jam, and I realized that that sound in the main title was more of an instinct that I presented to John Hoffman in my interview. After I read the script I was just sort of like, “What you think of this?” and I played it for him on the piano and he was like, “That melody, and those chord changes, that my show right there.” Like, he heard it.
For my band Goldspot there was an album called “And The Elephant Is Dancing”, and so much of my influence from that record was George Harrison and Brian Wilson and so much of ‘60s rock and roll had these quarter-note beats like dank dank dank dank, and it’s something that was in the music of Donovan, The Beach Boys, The Beatles, and I grew up listening to that music I loved that. So on the main title that pulsing piano probably came from my love for that ‘60s rock-and-roll and probably some of my Indian roots as well. That melodic part of the main theme, there is something about it that feels like old Indian music to me, I don’t know why. So it’s sort of the amalgamation of me.
It feels like a very distinct melody, when it comes back in the background on just piano or strings you can always kind of pinpoint it.
That was the thing too with that theme, in the main title theme there is this very percussive energy to it and that’s coming from our drummer James McAllister. He’s a drummer for Sufjan Stevens and played with The National too, so a very cool drummer. One of the notes from the producers was, “Sid, how do we make your main theme more New York?” It was very early on in the exploration of the music and I was like “Let me think about it.”
Because the Arconia is a mix of very wealthy people and sort of not-so-wealthy people, it almost mirrors New York. I mean, in New York you walk down the street and you walk past thousands of people and walk past the most socioeconomically diverse group of people you possibly can, and so I asked James to play Home Depot buckets. Sort of like a subway or street musician or something, thinking it would be something interesting. When I sent that in they loved it, and actually, all the percussion you hear on the main title is Home Depot buckets. But then that couldn’t work inside the show. It was interesting, they only worked on the main title, the buckets did not work anywhere else to my dismay. But the score was this orchestral, regal thing, like The Arconia, and so it didn’t really work elsewhere but at least it made it in the main title.
Did you have any hand in the animation of going through the different rooms in The Arconia?
I think from my recollection of it they were starting to work on that sequence and I don’t even think the animation company had my music yet. Like, even though I had written this piece, things all work at a lightning speed so when I got wind of the fact that they were working on an animated sequence I was like, “Wait a minute, take this piece!” I remember because the producers’ desire was to use this piece of music as the main title theme, so I ended up getting pictures from Elastic who did the visuals — who did such an incredible job, such a great sequence — so I saw their rough cut of it early on and I knew right away that my theme was going to work there. I knew it was going to hit the beats well but I needed to develop it more. So what Elastic originally got was a demo of what you hear now, and then as I saw what their picture was doing I developed the piece a lot, it grew. The length had to change, it was longer than I had originally written it, and then I was like “This is an opportunity to mix everything I want to do with the show, let’s have fun with this.” I wanted it to be this cool New York-y thing with the buckets, and then also be orchestral, and also have some of the bassoons that I wanted to put in the score, so it was a really great mix of all the different tones of the show.
It does fit super well which is why I thought, “They must have worked together on this.” I also wanted to ask about your process, is it the same for every project you work on, or does it change depending on the needs of the project?
I’m somebody that’s very moved by the page, so when I get a script for something I immediately start scoring the project in my head. This is before I even see the picture because there’s a lot that you can get off the page from the writer of a script. There is humor in the script, there is drama in the script, there is the language of how they write, how sharp they are with their humor, you can almost get a sense of their sensibility and so I start writing to that early in the process. When I’m reading the script, the one consistent thing in my process is that I’ll have my phone on a voice memo app and I’ll have it on record and I’ll go sit at my piano or my guitar or wherever I think the sound could be and I start musing along as I’m reading. I keep those early ideas available to me if something helps. Sometimes I come up with some awful stuff, and then sometimes I come up with some good stuff, but once I go through and have like two hours of me jamming along, then usually there’s like two to three minutes in there of something that’s quite good. The rest not so much. But there is something that I find in there. So that’s one thing that’s consistent in the process is writing early on.
Another thing is not being afraid to show people what you’re working on. I try not to be too precious with it because you never know. Had I not shown John this theme for Only Murders, it would have been a different piece of music, guaranteed. Early on, I wasn’t sure about it, it was in this very nascent demo form and I didn’t think anything of it but for some reason, I felt inspired after talking to John in my interview. Listening to him speak, John Hoffman, he’s a very bright, witty, funny person with a really special soul and very creative. I felt comfortable enough to be like, “Hey, what do you think of this?” So that’s another thing — not being afraid to show stuff early on because you never know, someone might identify something there that you didn’t think was there. And I’m pretty sure when I first wrote that theme and I started sending it in, I don’t think everybody was sold on it yet. I think John was, but I think it took a minute for everyone — producers, directors — to understand it. And it’s interesting because the entire sound of that main title is not really in the show outside of the main theme. I mean maybe the melodic and the thematic content obviously is everywhere, but the main title is really a standalone thing.