Siddhartha Khosla (‘Only Murders in the Building,’ ‘Rabbit Hole’) on expanding the sound of the show for Season 2 [Exclusive Video Interview]
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Siddhartha Khosla is a six-time Emmy-nominated composer who had to say goodbye to his greatest professional experience last year with the conclusion of “This Is Us,” on which he worked for six seasons with his longtime pal and ex-roommate at the University of Pennsylvania, Dan Fogelman. “It was a wonderful experience we’re going to get to replicate again soon,” Khosla teased without revealing any more about the new project the two men are working on together, as he’s sworn to silence. “It’s something very special,” he confirmed while adding that he’s already writing themes for it. Watch our exclusive video interview above.
However, what Khosla is most excited to discuss is his second season composing the music for the hit Hulu comedy “Only Murders in the Building” starring Steve Martin, Martin Short and Selena Gomez. The show earned him a pair of Emmy noms in 2022 for its score as well as bouncy, beguiling main title theme. And for season two, he notes, we definitely expanded the sound of the show. One reason was logistical. In season one, with the pandemic, we had a whole different set of restrictions in terms of how many musicians we could have together in a room. We had string players, we had woodwind players, we had people blowing things out of their mouths to make sounds. It wasn’t terribly COVID-friendly.
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“But last season, we got to have everybody in the room together again together, and we had a much larger ensemble. So the sound got bigger, and there just seemed to be a deeper emotional thread through the season. There was a lot of melancholy, a lot of sadness. The show really dove into the lives of the characters, and the score had to follow suit. It was a very score-heavy season, with new themes and a lot more mystery.”
Khosla’s time was also split this season on the new Paramount Plus espionage spy thriller series “Rabbit Hole” starring Kiefer Sutherland, for which Khosla was hired to compose the music (and more). The showrunners, Glenn Ficarra and John Requa, had worked with Khosla as directors on the “This Is Us” pilot. His marching orders were “to make something with the music that was just unsettling, to match the tension of the world Kiefer’s character John Weir was running in. They gave me a lot of freedom to just find the sound and create stuff.”
SEERocco Matteo interview: ‘Rabbit Hole’ production designer
What kind of stuff are we talking about? “Well, a lot of the sounds you hear in the show are recorded from my voice, processed through distortions and reverbs. We did a lot of that. Vocals that I would sing and distort myself. There was a lot of that sort of experimentation. Glen and John were just like, ‘Go for it.’ Between the score and the sound design, it was all about finding that unsettling element. We also use a live orchestra on ‘Rabbit Hole,’ and we’d encourage musicians to, say, use their violins in uncomfortable ways that almost sound like percussion. It was almost like they were abusing their instruments to create the sound.”
Besides “Only Murders” and “Rabbit Hole” and his forthcoming secret project with Fogelman, Khosla has plenty more keeping him busy. He also collaborated on the music over past 12 to 18 months on the limited series “Welcome to Chippendales,” the Reese Witherspoon–Ashton Kutcher rom com “Your Place or Mine,” the Hindi-language drama “Gulmohar” and the ABC crime drama “The Company You Keep.”
The first two seasons of “Only Murders in the Building” are streaming on Hulu. The eight-episode first season of “Rabbit Hole” streams on Paramount+.
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