Composer Siddhartha Khosla on Finding His Voice and Creating “Out of the Box” Music Scores

Let me take a crack at describing a Siddhartha Khosla score—thrilling, surprising, infectious, and to steal his own words, “out of the box.” His compositions don’t sound like anyone else’s on television—that in and of itself is a skill that Khosla has honed in on over many years—developing a killer instinct and sticking to it.

Coming off of a six-year stint as the composer for This is Us, the Emmy nominee returns to the awards conversation having served as the composer for season two of Hulu’s Only Murders in the Building; the Kumail Nanjiani-starring Welcome to Chippendales, and Rabbit Hole, a dystopian action thriller starring Kiefer Sutherland.

Here in an interview with Awards Daily, Khosla takes a deep dive into his trio of new projects—and the joy of doing what he loves best—making great music.

Awards Daily: Sidd, you’ve got three different projects we need to dig into— Only Murders in the Building, Welcome to Chippendales, and Rabbit Hole.                          

Siddhartha Khosla: Yes, completely different projects. I feel pretty lucky that I get to work with some fantastic showrunners whom all have their own unique perspectives and vision. 

On Only Murders in the Building, it’s John Hoffman and company, and Dan Fogelman, who’s part of that project as well. They have always wanted an outside-the-box, interesting, and cinematic approach to the score. That identity has only gotten clearer over the seasons. We’ve honed in on something really deep with that score. That whole show is lightning in a bottle to me.  

Rabbit Hole is a thriller, and I had to create a score and a sound to the score that felt like it was nonstop tension and uncomfortably tense. I relied on a lot of analog synths and a lot of homemade synthesizers. I used my voice a lot in there. We also had an incredible orchestra that was very Penderecki-inspired, using instruments in weird ways. That was a very dark score. 

Welcome to Chippendales was an epic saga about an immigrant coming to the United States and the immigrant dream. A dream gone very, very wrong.

Everybody on all three shows is an artist. Everyone pushes me to think outside the box as much as possible. And I think because of that, we’ve got three very, very different scores.

 I’m one of those artists who really likes to have different things going on because I enjoy the challenge. I’m forced to come up with and deliver something quickly. I fear I will procrastinate forever if left to my own devices. I function best when someone’s over my shoulder saying, ‘Come up with something now.’ I enjoy that process. I also have a great team that helps deliver this stuff because everyone’s chipping in to help make it sound great. It’s a team effort that helps get it across the finish line.

AD: You mentioned going “really deep” for the Only Murders score. What does that mean exactly?

SK: Well, one thing was a logistical hurdle that we did not have anymore: Covid. Because restrictions were loosened, we could have more players in a room together and return to the original vision. And in my mind, that was a larger ensemble playing the score. In the first season, I had to piece stuff together. We would have quartets coming in one at a time to play. I’m very proud of the season one score. I think, thematically, it was strong. I feel like in the execution, musically, I always wanted to have everyone in the room together because there’s a certain magic that happens when live players are there together. We got everyone together in a room again in season two, which was nice. And we got to record in legendary places like Capital Records, where everyone played from The Beatles to Sinatra. So, there was a quality to the music and magic that we got to bring this season because of that.

And I could go bigger; we had a more majestic sound in places. We started getting into people’s backstories. The show took on a deeper, more emotional head space. I had to tap into that. Mabel had that incredible episode where it was just her backstory that I could play with, doing moving piano-based pieces. A classical pianist named Carol plays on the score, and she did a wonderful job adding that magic to the score.

With Only Murders, it never feels like there are any boundaries. John Hoffman and I have such a good working relationship, and he trusts me. The editors on the show are amazing, and we have such strong relationships creatively, and the collaboration is really strong. We’re always trying not to settle for anything, 

AD: Transitioning to Welcome to Chippendales, a miniseries, what was it like going in knowing that it was going to be a self-contained story? Is there a consideration of “I have to put all my chips on the table because I only get one shot at the music?”

SK: It’s a great question. It’s not that you have one shot; it’s just that you don’t have multiple seasons to develop a sound. So, you have to think of where the season’s headed and where you’re ending when you’re beginning. With Only Murders, I never really thought of the end game of the series or even the end game of the first season when I started working on Only Murders in the Building. I was getting my feet wet working on it. Whereas with Welcome to Chippendales, I had to think of the grand picture right away, and I didn’t want to be in a position where, six episodes in, I would be like, ‘Oh, we need a really big orchestra on this, and I’m realizing it now.’ Some of these conversations happened way ahead of time because of that.

I guess you’re right in a way that it is one shot. You have to get it right from the beginning. With, This is Us, for example, I had six seasons to develop my sound; it changed drastically.

AD: Welcome to Chippendales is an immigrant story; it’s a sexy, dark true crime. How did you encompass all of those elements in your score? What were you drawing from? 

SK: In my conversations with [creator] Robert Siegel, the core of that story was the immigrant dream gone bad. So I scored it from the perspective of what the most glorified version of the immigrant dream feels like to somebody, all the hopes, dreams, and aspirations. The main theme you hear, the emotional theme for Somen Banerjee, it’s really this idealized version of a dream—the hopes and aspirations of coming to this country, a wide-eyed immigrant—what does that sound like? What does a wide-eyed immigrant sound like? I pulled from my own family stories. My parents came to this country from India. I was thinking about my own family and writing it from the perspective of their experience. And then, when things got darker, I could take that theme and work it, and with cool orchestrations and other applications of the theme, I could make it more sorted if I need to change some melodies here and there.

AD: Tell me about Rabbit Hole. 

SK: Glenn Ficarra and John Requa, the creators, just wanted nonstop tension. I mean, the finale has over 50 minutes of score in it. It does not stop. Sonically, I love using my analog synthesizers when I can. There’s a lot of that. The way we wrote for the orchestra, with violinists and string players, added to the tension too. The score sounds haunting, uncomfortable, and scratchy. There was nothing clean about it. It’s a very distorted sound. And it’s not something I get to dabble in that often, but it certainly brings me to some of my darker, alternative musical roots. There was also a little bit of a 70s-ish sound to it in places. With the distortions we did, it felt like we were making a record. And some of it was Zeppelin-esque in tone. There are some big and wide thundering sounds in places, which was so much fun to play with.

AD: I’m always fascinated by the rhythm of the scene versus the rhythm of the score and the placement of the score. What goes into making those decisions?

SK: It all depends on the project. 

For Rabbit Hole, the score’s pacing was key because they were cutting scenes and pictures to the score and cutting it to a certain pacing. They were very, very specific with me on where the score should be.

On Only Murders in the Building, the process is more fluid when I’m watching a scene, and I feel where it should go, or the editor feels where they think it should go. It’s a lot of me interpreting pictures. Taking a scene that may be dramatic, but then scoring it emotionally because I’m scoring to the subtext of why the characters are there, to that kind of feeling. So it varies. On Welcome to Chippendales, I had a big hand in where the score would come in.

You feel it and respond. The picture tells us where the score should come in. Rabbit Hole, which had wall-to-wall score in the finale, for example, felt cool, and you didn’t breathe for 50 minutes. 

I generally like being in a position where I can make some of the choices. When a composer sees a dry picture, for example, they could respond to it much differently than somebody else in production. I like that feeling of having a way to react. It’s creative, and it’s fun for me. 

On Rabbit Hole, a lot of the temp score was the one I’d been creating before the series started. Without th temp score, I might have been more lost because Glenn and John had such a specific idea and shape for everything.

It’s great to work with people whom you just implicitly trust. Suddenly, I see my score being used in a way I had not intended, and I’m like, ‘Oh my God, that may be the best-scored scene in the series.

AD: What’s something new you learned from these projects? 

SK: Every time, it teaches me something new. The lesson I walk away with every time is that the best scores are the ones with great collaboration. And collaboration on many different levels—with editors, directors, other musicians, the live players, and what they bring to the process. There’s a lot of magic that the live players bring.

I come from a band background. I didn’t go to school for the score. I didn’t study film compositions. My entire career has been in bands and recording all my records in the studio, so I think my natural inclination as a songwriter or composer is to create your own sounds and create your own voice and have your own voice. Being able to continually do that in composing is a very empowering thing. Another thing I’ve learned is always to try to insert your vision and your voice—you don’t have to sound like everybody else.

I’ve never been someone that tried to sound like someone else. Maybe early on in my band career, when I first started playing music long ago, I was like, ‘Oh, I wanna sound like Radiohead.’ But since then, it’s been an evolution of finding original ways to express myself. 

And to your original point about how different these three projects are, it’s great that I have people around me who trust me and want me to be myself and find my own voice in this stuff. That’s such a special part of this process for me.

Only Murders in the Building and Welcome to Chippendales are streaming on Hulu; Rabbit Hole is streaming on Paramount+.