Breaking down the main musical theme of Only Murders In The Building

Watch even one episode of Hulu’s charming crime comedy Only Murders In The Building and you’ll likely come away with its theme stuck in your head. The plucky instrumental tune perfectly encapsulates the world of the Arconia, as well as the quirky inner workings of Steve Martin, Martin Short, and Selena Gomez’s true-crime obsessed New Yorker characters.

But where did that music come from, and why is it so damn catchy? We sat down with the show’s composer, Siddhartha Khosla, to talk about its creation, as well as about the show’s main musical themes. There’s a lovely musical excerpt from our chat in the video, but if you want to dive further into the OMITB’s tunes, there’s a more in-depth chat below.

The A.V. Club: How did you get this gig, and what were the parameters of what the show was looking for?

Siddhartha Khosla: I’ve worked with a couple of the producers before over the years. Dan Fogelman, Jess Rosenthal, and I have had a great run working on This Is Us for five seasons going into our sixth.

John Hoffman created the show with Steve Martin, and Dan introduced me to John Hoffman, who is the showrunner, to see if we clicked. John is one of the nicest and most creative people I’ve met in this industry.

When we met, we had a Zoom call, and I think he’d heard some of my music. On the Zoom call, I just started playing some pieces of music that the script had inspired me to write and also just some pieces of music that I’ve been writing when the pandemic hit.

As a timeline, when the pandemic hit, production stopped, and so there was a lull. I had this idea that I was going to write my own modern classical instrumental record. This was at the same time that people were making their own bread. I was writing my album just for fun for myself, to sort of stretch. That experiment lasted for a very short time, but in the process, I’d come up with some ideas and things that I was flirting with.

On my call with John and the producers, I played a couple of the pieces, and John was like, “oh my gosh” about one piece I played. He was like, “That could totally be an emotional center of the show.” It’s the piece of music you hear at the end of episode four when Tina Fey is doing her podcast.

Then there was this other piece of music that I’d written that ultimately ended up becoming the main title theme. John was like, “that right there,” when he heard that piece of music. He was like “That’s the theme. It makes me smile and it feels mysterious, it feels funny, and it feels sort of like it’s in the magical realism of the world we may be playing into.” And that got me the job ultimately.

AVC: There is a show within a show here, in some sense. The theme kind of has a “podcast music” vibe. It’s sometimes plinky, sometimes a little mysterious, especially when you’re talking about true crime podcasts. How did you bring those elements into the show, like with the theme of Not OK In Oklahoma, for instance?

SK: For the Not OK In Oklahoma music, they wanted a podcast theme that, well… in my mind, I was trying to write a piece of music that could be in an NPR show. It felt like it needed to feel kind of cool, but not too cool, and it needed to sit in this very neutral space. Actually, one of the hardest things I had to write was that Oklahoma song, because how do I write a piece of music that’s just mildly cool?

In terms of the slinky piano stuff, honestly, before this show, I had never listened to any sort of murder podcast or anything like that, like any mystery podcast ever. I’ve started now. I’m listening to them nonstop because the show got me into listening to that stuff.

I have a band called Goldspot and on my second album, which is maybe 10 years old, a lot of the influence on my music at the time was coming from The Beach Boys and The Beatles, and The Beach Boys and Beatles have a lot of that plinky kind of like “dun dun dun dun dun.” So that was the inspiration for me.

I remember when I played my theme for John and the gang, they immediately fell in love. I think it maybe gave them the feeling of mystery. Honestly, that was not my intent, but I had written it. So for me, when I hear it now on the show, it’s like what Hitchcock used to do with strings in his films, but if you put that on a piano. It fits in the vibe of the show. It’s a mix of Hitchcock and Brian Wilson Beach Boys in my head. That’s why the score then ends up feeling mysterious and whimsical all at the same time.

AVC: It’s interesting, because the podcast within the show does develop over time, and they do get better and more cohesive, and the music reflects that.

SK: Yeah, absolutely. If I remember, the concertina theme, there’s a version of that that ends up coming up in their podcast over and over again. At the opening of the episodes when you see the name of the episode, you start hearing some music in those like it’s their podcast music which is inspired by that concertina stuff.

AVC: Let’s talk about the show’s theme: How did that come together, and what did you want to create there?

SK: The most important thing for me when I’m writing a piece of music is the melody. It’s always the thing that gets stuck in your head. I’m a songwriter, so melody is the thing that I remember.

What I like to do when I work in TV and film is that I get inspired by the material or I get inspired by a conversation or by a script and I just write. For this theme, I wanted it to have balance and I wanted to have it be punchy…

A key moment was when one of the producers said to me, “How do we bring New York into the song?” For me, when I think of New York—I grew up in New Jersey and I went to New York and my wife is from where I lived in New York and so much of my childhood experience in New York is just remembering the music that would happen on the street. Sometimes, in subways, there are people playing Home Depot buckets and things like that.

A drummer friend of mine, James [McAlister], who plays with The National and Sufjan Stevens and is a super cool drummer, he went out and bought a bunch of Home Depot buckets. So the main title begins on buckets. If you hear drums, that’s all Home Depot buckets. That made us experience New York in a different way. I felt the street a little more and then that along with the mixture of the classic and the new is what that theme ended up being.

The theme just became such an earworm for the producers. Dan Fogelman, Jess Rosenthal, Jamie Babbit, and John Hoffman could not get enough of it. John was like, “I want you to weave it in and out of the score in a creative way.”

I was also fortunate to have a budget for an orchestra, so you can hear a huge orchestra on every episode of the show. So there are variations of that theme. There are some emotional themes for the show that you hear too. It all comes from that palette.

AVC: Do the characters have themes? Is the music when you’re following Steve different than Selena’s music, or does it just adhere to the vibe of the show as a whole?

SK: It might be different in some of the instrumentation. I use a bassoon a lot in the score, and that was fun for me because I’ve never used a bassoon before and we had some of the best bassoon players in the country playing on the score. And so the bassoon at a couple of moments works really nicely in the pilot episode for Steve.

With Selena, there’s a Mabel and Tim story, right? In episode two, she has those visions of Tim, and you hear a variation on my main title, but it’s more haunting. It’s a little more stylized, like I have like a more modern take on how I’m playing some of that stuff.

There’s also their mission theme, the “tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick,” it’s driving. That weaves in and out of a lot of the scenes.

I like being thematic and having a few central themes. It ties all of our characters together in a fun way, too.

I know with Marty, for example, in episode three, when he has those dream sequences where he’s auditioning possible killers, that’s one of the funniest scenes to me. I definitely brought in a more of a jazzy take on the score there. It’s a little more show tune, and there’s more Broadway in it. It had a little more of the snap that complemented Oliver.

AVC: Steve Martin is such a talented musician and there’s a point in the show where he’s even playing his version of the theme of the concertina. How did that come together?

SK: John had called me and said that we needed a concertina theme and asked, “Can you write something?” I actually have this Indian accordion called a harmonium, and so I used that. John was like, “I just want you to come up with something that is just the right amount of annoying.” That piece of music worked perfectly for Marty Short’s joke when he says, “It sounds like music for a Hobbit’s wedding.”

It’s all this wonderful sort of collaboration with John and Dan and the producers and Jamie Babbit, our director. There were no rules, which is the best reason why some of these ideas came up.