Siddhartha Khosla serves as the composer for both television shows Only Murders in the Building and Paradise. Having composed on Only Murders in the Building for all four seasons, he is continually surprised by the creative opportunities the show gives him: from having an opera singer performing over the finale to creating deep emotional music over the loss of a beloved character. Meanwhile, Hulu’s buzzy hit Paradise is a very different show. There, his score is used to create a sense of unease and tension. Both of these shows give Siddhartha Khosla a lot of chances to stretch himself. He elaborates on both projects here in an interview with The Contending.
The Contending: You are now four seasons into Only Murders in the Building. Has anything changed for you over this time, or was there anything about the fourth season that was different in particular?
Siddhartha Khosla: With some of the season being in Los Angeles, we had a different setting for a few episodes. And as with every season, Only Murders in the Building always has some special magical episode to keep the audience on their toes. John Hoffman is great with coming up with these crazy ideas. There was “Blow-Up” being shot like a student film, so the score for that had to feel like it was being made by your friends who play cello down the hall. Then in the finale we had an opera singer come in and sing on the final queue when they find Lester in the fountain. It is just a joy and a privilege to work on this show.
The Contending: It’s great that you brought up The Fountain score because I remember hearing it when I watched the finale and getting and enjoying the music. Then I re-listened to it and literally got chills. So I’m curious how you came up with the idea for that score with the opera singer?
Siddhartha Khosla: John (Hoffman) doesn’t give us a playbook, in a good way! He gives us a feeling that he wants to feel in certain areas and then just tells us to go with whatever moves us. Then for whatever reason I heard an opera singer. The way I write scores is that I’m singing along with it so my voice ends up in early versions of a score as I’m humming something. Then somebody suggested why don’t we do something with the voice because a voice has a very lyrical quality that can be emotional and expressive in a way that other instruments cannot. So my instinct to support voice work just made that work.
The Contending: The other score that really jumped out to me was Rush to Sazz. Where you have what sounds like just one piano key before it builds to that big crescendo. It plays up a lot of the sadness of what happened to Sazz. I wondered what went into creating that?
Siddhartha Khosla: There was a desire to do something almost Hitchcockian where it was just quiet pulsing tension and nothing else. The instinct is to put more in and the light piano music is just a placeholder before the orchestra plays on top of it. But sometimes the piano alone can be so evocative and do so much and it did so much in that scene that we just left it. Also our editor Shelly Westerman really helped marry the music and the picture in how she heard the score. She is incredible.
The Contending: I noticed with every song that has Sazz’s name in it there is this melancholy to it. I was wondering how much inspiration for that work came from that character and what happened to her?
Siddhartha Khosla: Before the season started John and I had a conversation about how we would be delving into Sazz’s backstory. Up to this point we have seen Sazz as a comedic powerhouse when she comes in. Then to hear this idea from John that we are going to delve into her past and learn about her childhood and the inspiration from her father and how she became who she became. We find a different side to Sazz and a humanity to her that we had not seen to this point. So I wrote these emotional cues and scores for Sazz early on before the season started filming, and then we started developing them into these really beautiful piano motifs that I say are beautiful, not because I wrote them but because my pianist Carol (Kuswanto) brought so much elegance to the piece. So you hear that threaded throughout the season.
The Contending: You have another big show this year, Paradise, that has a very different sound to it than Only Murders in the Building. How did you approach that show?
Siddhartha Khosla: Yes, it’s a whole different palate and sound! Paradise has been such a labor of love. I worked on it with my friend Dan Fogelman who created the show, and we go way back together to our college days. So Dan and I have a great trust between each other, and he gives me scripts really, really early, and gives me time to work on ideas months before we shoot, while also working with the directors Glenn Ficarra and John Requa. So that gave me the opportunity to write some heroic thematic material that became the theme of the show. The guys knew they wanted the show to feel like we were trapped, and we didn’t know why and wanted to capture that kind of feeling. So a lot of the music was this unrelenting tension that we couldn’t get out using hand-created synths that I made with my voice and a lot of effects creating a very organic score. The orchestra was great as well, and did a lot of unconventional ways of performing the score–bending up to notes, using col legno technique where they were percussive with the violins, playing it aggressively and giving that feel of being unsafe.
The Contending: You mentioned getting the scripts in advance. I wonder how that inspired the big orchestral moment with the sign in the sky saying they’re lying to you?
Siddhartha Khosla: I didn’t get the script early for that episode, more just for the pilot and the second episode. But yeah, with that moment we wanted the audience to feel so uneasy and scared. I’m not even sure how I wrote stuff like that, the ask was to do something that’s big and frenetic and so I just wrote stuff for the orchestra to do in that way.
The Contending: Anything you can say about the next seasons of both of these shows?
Siddhartha Khosla: I’m working on both of them now. In fact, I’ll be having a meeting about season 5 of Only Murders in the Building after this interview. Then with Paradise, I have started work on the first episode of season 2 and it is awesome! The episode is just awesome! That is all I can say.
Both Only Murders in the Building and Paradise are available to stream on Hulu.
