Song Exploder - Siddhartha Khosla - Only Murders in the Building (Main Title Theme)

Episode Date: August 16, 2023

The "Skip Intro" button first got introduced to us through Netflix in 2017, and, I know, a lot of people use it – including me. But, if I can get into old-man, back-in-my-day mode for a second, I have so much fondness for the opening theme music for so many shows. It’s a chance to set the mood for everything that you’re about to see. One of the intros that I never skip is the animated opening title sequence for Only Murders in the Building, which is a Hulu show that debuted in August 2021, and now is in its third season. It was created by Steve Martin and John Hoffman, and it stars Steve Martin, Martin Short, and Selena Gomez. The three of them play neighbors who live in the same building in New York, and they’re all obsessed with the same true crime podcast. And then when someone in their building gets murdered, they decide to start their own true crime podcast, and try and solve the mystery of who the killer is. For this episode, I talked to the show’s composer, Siddhartha Khosla, about the show’s theme music. Coming up, you’ll hear a voice memo that Siddhartha recorded before he’d even heard about the show, which then led to a demo that you’ll hear, and eventually, the final theme. For more, visit songexploder.net/only-murders-in-the-building.

You're listening to Song Exploder, where musicians take apart their songs, and piece by piece tell the story of how they were made. I'm Rishi Kesh Hirwe. Just a quick note before we start, since this is an episode about a TV show, you know, Song Exploder is a podcast about creativity. We stand with the WGA and SAG Aftera and the creativity that those unions support. Okay, here we go. The Skip Intro Button first got introduced to us through Netflix in 2017. I know a lot of people use it, including me. But if I can get into old man back in my day mode for a second,

I have so much fondness for the opening theme music for so many shows. It's a chance to set the mood for everything that you're about to see. One of the intros that I never skip is the animated opening title sequence for Only Murders in the Building, which is a Hulu show that debuted in August 2021, and now is in its third season. It was created by Steve Martin and John Hoffman, and it stars, Steve Martin, Martin Short, and Selena Gomez. The three of them play neighbors who live in the same building in New York, and they're all obsessed with the same true crime podcast. And then when someone

in their building gets murdered, they decide to start their own true crime podcast and try and solve the mystery of who the killer is. For this episode, I talked to composer Siddhartha Kosla about the show's theme music. Coming up, you'll hear a voice memo that Siddhartha recorded before he'd ever even heard about the show, which then led to a demo that you'll hear, and then eventually the final theme. My name is Sidhartha Kosla, and I'm the composer for Only Murders in the Building. I had spent six seasons working with Dan Fulgelman, who created This Is Us. Dan reached out to me and said, hey, I want to get you in touch with John Hoffman, who's going to be show running the show and co-created Only Murders with Steve Martin. Let's just see if you're going to get you in touch with John Hoffman, who's

Let's just see if you guys hit it off. In the meantime, I'm going to send you a script and see what you think. And it totally blew me away. It was funny. It was dramatic. It was deeper than sort of your normal comedy. I wrote a note back to Dan. Only murders is magic.

And that led to my meeting with John Hoffman. We were firmly in the pandemic at that point. And a lot of productions had stopped for this period. and I decided to write my own sort of instrumental classical record. I'm not a classically trained musician. I grew up singing as a kid like old Hindi songs. I was in a band. I don't have the classical music chops.

And so I wanted to start writing so I could also get over that hump any insecurity that I have about my own ability. And so I wrote all this music over a two or three month period. While everything stopped, and I played some of that stuff for John in my meeting on the piano, I just noodled and played a couple things. He was like, this is exactly the tone of my show. That's my main theme right there. And I was shocked.

I was like, really? I was like, that can't be it, John. He's like, no, that's it. It makes me feel happy. It makes me feel sad. I feel mystery. I feel comedy. I feel intrigue.

It feels very New York to me. and I want you to finish it. This is really a story about three disparate souls that live in an apartment building in New York City. It's three people trying to find connection, three people who are also incredibly lonely in their own way. And this podcast that they create, it's really about their emotional connection.

And so if I score the music based on that underlying need for connection, then it sort of makes the mystery and the drama that much more powerful when you see it unfold. Old Hindi music, music my parents brought to this country when they came here, and I lived in India as a kid, if you listen to that music, it's all about the melody. And so I grew up dreaming in melody and thinking in melody and writing in melody. So this had that. The da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da. It was also a very Indian melody. Like, I could sing it with like Indian inflection.

Na, nah, nah, nah. Like, you could do stuff like that if you wanted to to do it. So the vocals that you hear are my vocals. And then there's a melitron that I use. It's a digital melitron. It's like it's got these beetlesy sort of like sounds to them. I also was proud of the chord changes in there. Each phrase ends in the major. or minor version of the next chord that follows. So, like, the first phrase ends on G major. And right after that G major, I go to a G minor. And then D major to D minor.

It's an odd switch. And it becomes unsettling for a moment. I'm also playing flute. The flute was the first instrument I ever played. And so I have one sitting around, and when I can, I just take it out and I just do stuff like that where I can color something. And it was all loose. It was free.

I wasn't thinking about anything when I wrote that, except like, let me be weird if I want to and not judge myself. And I'm jumping up and down, playing that flute like an idiot. And so I'm building the stuff at home in my studio, and I got the melitron, I got my vocals, I got the piano. I have my little fingers on a little snare drum. What you're hearing right there, that is the very, very first little demo.

When I sent it to John, he came back and he goes, I love this, but how do we make this even more New York? In our conversations, John would always talk about the dichotomy of rich and poor in New York City, that as you're walking down a block in New York City, you know, you see incredible amounts of wealth, and then you also see abject poverty. Even in the Arconia where everybody lives in the show,

you have people that have been living there forever who are paying hundreds of dollars a month in rent versus people that are incredibly wealthy that have these gorgeous apartments that are worth millions and millions of dollars. And so how do you make this more New York? I went back with my team and we were talking and Alan at the time was my assistant.

We were sitting and chatting, and he said, well, what if we made it sound like a homeless guy in the subway playing along? Wouldn't they be using, like, Home Depot paint buckets or something? And I was like, oh, that's a great idea. And immediately when he said that, I reached out to James McAllister, who is one of my favorite drummers. He plays with the National. He plays with Sufian Stevens and played on at least the last Taylor Swift. Swift record. And I told James the concept. I think he was in a cabin somewhere. He's like, but I got some microphones. There's some paint buckets in like the garage over here somewhere. I said,

yes, find what you've got. He went out into the woods, collected a bunch of twigs and tied them together to make drumsticks out of him. He took some pots and pans. And he assembled a little drum kit and it was awesome. These are James's paint buckets and pots and pans. I sent it back to John and the gang, and they were like, that's New York to me. I started just sort of flirting around with what live orchestra might sound like, and so there's pizocato cello in the melaton also. And I was like, I'm just going to write parts

that'll eventually get played by our orchestra. And then somehow in the final mix, we felt like, actually, some of that shitty sounding cello feels cool, leave it. Because sometimes it's that combination of the live cello, with that sort of fake cello together that feels cool. It's the best feeling is that everyone signs off, studio network producers.

We love it, great. Yeah, I thought I was done. But when they did the animation sequence, they actually had done it to a different piece of music. It was some oldie song with vocals. I would have hoped that they would have cut the animation to the theme because the timing is everything. And so the sequence that they sent me

was twice as long as the demo. And they were like, don't worry, just loop it. And in my mind, I was like, oh, no, this is not going to work. You can't just double up on the theme. It's going to get so repetitive, and it needs more movement. It needs more movement. And so now I'm going to add one more round of the melody, and we are going to re-orchestrate the back half,

so it feels like we intended to do that. So at the end of the main theme, you hear these screeches and in my mind it's a cat discovering like danger. And with my voice, I actually sang, ah, ha. And then I pitched it up like two or three octaves. And it sounds so ridiculous. And then we had the violins try to recreate that.

And it's just a random thing of me pretending I was a cat, discovering a dead body. Up until the mix, I was making. changes to this. And they probably didn't even realize all this stuff I had done. They're like, oh, cool, cool, cool. But things just happen to work out on this show. So in our pilot episode, Julie Monroe, who was editing it, she goes, Sid, every time there's a clue, every time somebody discovers something, I want to hear the da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da. I want to hear that there. And somehow, the phrasing always seems to work when we drop it in.

And so the presence of that melody, if you closed your eyes and you watch the show, the score can also tell you a little bit about what's happening. It's a beautiful collaboration at that show. It's unlike anything I've experienced before. Coming up, you'll hear how all of these ideas and elements came together in the final piece. I have a new album of my own coming out on April 24th. It's been about 15 years since I last put out of full ink. And this is the first one that'll be out under my own name, Rishikesh Her Way.

I started making Song Exploder when I was feeling lost in my own music career. And then for over a decade, I've gotten to have these incredible conversations about the process of making music, talking to other artists. And it made me completely rethink my relationship to music and my way of writing songs. And this album is the product of all of that. It features contributions from some of my favorite artists, including some folks that you may have heard on this podcast, like Iron and Wine, Kevin Morby, Vagabon, Fenlily, and the producer Phil Weinrobe. I'm going to be on tour playing in cities across the U.S. starting in April, and I'm trying to bring the spirit of the podcast with me.

So every show that I'm playing will begin with a conversation about the album with a different amazing guest moderator in each city. Like Adam Scott, Samin Nasrat, Jason Manzuchas, Josh Malina, Minjin Lee, Ken Jennings, John Roderick, Austin Cleon, and more. They're all going to be my conversation partners on stage. And then I'll play with my band. The album is called In the Last Hour of Light, and the first couple songs were out now. You can listen to the music and get tickets for the shows on my website, rishikash.com.

Or just go to songexploder.net slash live. That's songexploder.net slash live. Thanks. And now here's the main title theme for Only Murders in the Building by Siddhartha Kosla in its entirety. Visit songexploder.net to learn more. You'll find links to buy or stream the Only Murder's theme song, and you can watch the opening title sequence from Season 1. If you like this episode, there are a lot of other TV theme song episodes

that you could check out next. One of the very first episodes that I made of Song Exploder is from 2014 about the Bob's Berger's theme song. That was back before the skip intro button existed. You'll find that and all the other episodes of the podcast at songexploader.net or wherever you listen. Song Exploder is produced by me, Craig Ely, Kathleen Smith, and Mary Dolan. The episode artwork is by Carlos Lerma, and I made the show's theme music and logo. Song Exploder is a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX, a network of independent, listener-supported, artist-owned

podcasts. You can learn more about our shows at Radiotopia.fm. You can follow me on Instagram at Rishi Hereway, and you can follow the show at Song Exploder. You can get a Song Explorer t-shirt at SongExploder.net slash shirt. I'm Rishi-Kesh Hereway. Thanks for listening.