The pandemic complicated production on Season 1 of Hulu’s Only Murders in the Building, so composer Siddhartha Khosla was elated to be able to assemble musicians to create his dream theme song for Season 2.
“When we first started working on this show, it was early in the pandemic. So we were limited in terms of how many players we could have performed the score together,” Khosla said during a panel for the Hulu comedy at Deadline’s Sound and Screen: Television event. “This is the type of score that is in my dream world, it would sound like what it sounded like just now where you have an ensemble of musicians playing together, feeling the music and really coming together.”
He continued, “Season 1 is a lot of me making little demos at home on my Mellotron and it was a much smaller, quirkier score. Then we would have quartets come in and sort of pile quartets on top of quartets. It worked and it was definitely a thing, but second season, we were finally able to have more people in the room and it changed the dynamic. When you have this many people together playing, something different happens.”
Khosla also shared insight into how he worked alongside co-creator John Hoffman to map out what the hit series would sound like in Season 2. The composer revealed Hoffman and co-creator Steve Martin “both have these insanely crazy ideas.”
“John said he wanted to go bigger with the score, but bigger doesn’t always mean better. So there’s a balance of that. We started to use more vocals with some opera singing as you heard just now [during the Sound & Screen event, which featured a 50-piece orchestra]. At the end of the finale last year, we had a bunch of yodelers come in. I wouldn’t even bother trying — they did that sh*t and it was insane; it was so cool. They were these yodelers in New York singing my theme song and I gave them the woodwind parts and they [yodeled] to that.
“It was so awesome but that’s how the theme basically got stupider,” he said with a laugh.
Check back Friday for the panel video.
