Emmy-Nominated Music Editor Micha Liberman On Tackling the Musical Season of ‘Only Murders’

Micha Liberman is the Emmy-nominated music editor for Hulu’s Only Murders in the Building. With the third season’s Broadway-focused storyline, he faced a significant amount of additional work, but the season offered a very satisfying creative experience overall. Here, in an interview with Awards Daily, he describes the fun of capturing “Which of the Pickwick Triplets Did It?” in one take as well as some of the more emotional moments this season offered. Liberman also dives into his overall dedication to making certain an orchestra warming up sounded perfect. Nominated in the Outstanding Sound Editing For a Comedy Or Drama Series (Half-Hour) and Animation category, Liberman’s love for his Only Murders work shines through in the music and in his words.

Awards Daily: This season with the Broadway show had a lot more musical moments than the other seasons. Did that change how you had to approach the season?

Micha Liberman: It was totally different, probably one of the most difficult things I’ve had to do in my entire career because it doubled the whole job. In previous seasons and thankfully again in season 4, the music team is me and the composer and his team. In season 3 we had a whole other team in New York led by Benj Pasek, Justin Paul and Ian Eisendrath that was producing the songs. So I had two different departments I had to manage at the same time and twice as much music to deal with. Then add to that this wasn’t a normal musical. In a regular musical the backgrounds go away and the produced song comes up and we go into magic land where no one expects anything to be real.

But this was a show about people putting on a musical, so when they were on stage they were on stage and you had to believe you were hearing a singer coming from the stage. A lot of the time you were and a lot of the time you weren’t, and getting the best performance for each syllable for all of those songs (the Pickwick Triplets song has a lot of syllables). So, as I said, this is probably one of the most difficult things I’ve ever had to do and conversely one of the most rewarding. You saw how it came out. I couldn’t have been prouder.

Awards Daily: “The Pickwick Triplets” song was a highlight of the season with Steve Martin attempting to sing it going into the white room where we cut to this more relaxing almost elevator music. What were those cuts between those very different scenes like for you?

Micha Liberman: There’s a lot of back and forth about what the white room should sound like and that was actually an original composition by the series composer Siddhartha Khosla. It was really spearheaded by the showrunner John Hoffman’s vision of taking us to a fantasy world, letting go of everything the show sounds like and what we have done before, and going to a completely different place. I feel like everything just landed exactly in the right place in the season.

Awards Daily: You talked about how we still have to believe that it was an actual show they were putting on. I will have to make a confession that I have listened to “Creatures of the Night” on YouTube way too many times, and one of the things I really love is the song starts with that background of the sea and you even hear a little bit of Martin Short’s steps as he walks on the stage. I was curious how that was all compiled together?

Micha Liberman: So there were a lot of discussions in the music department with the sound designers about what kind of sounds would they put in a theater production, and then how does that translate to a television show. So, can we get the same emotional impact that they get from a sound effect in a theater through the television while also making it sound like it could be a sound effect in a theater. Like you said, they did an absolutely masterful job. There was a lot of back and forth collaboration. We were sending them early cuts of the music and they were sending us early cuts of the sound effects to make sure everyone knew whose moment belonged to who. Of course in the end Lindsey Alvarez our mixer wove it all together into that final very effective beautiful soundtrack.

Awards Daily: In the episode “Sitzprobe” (which is your Emmy submission episode) one of my favorite parts with the music is when Loretta is trying to sing her song and there is this piano beat so you can feel her tension, and then the visual of her nervousness with her song creates the tension so beautifully. Then you cut into, I believe it was part of the theme song’s music, continuing to build up the tension as she is being arrested and Oliver is having a heart attack. That seems like a very difficult scene to put together. Was it really as difficult as it looked?

Micha Liberman: There are two things to that. The first is you have an actress playing an actress who is acting a scene while she is actually emoting what’s happening to the character. It is a very complicated thing happening in that moment, and thank God we have the greatest actress of all time to pull it off perfectly. Meryl Streep did the lion’s share of the work at that moment, it was our job to just stay out of her way. The musical part was the easy part actually. It was getting out of that and transitioning into the underscore without them fighting each other and being bumped by the music changing. It all just has to flow naturally, and a lot of that comes from the way the picture editors cut the pictures, but most of it comes from the way it’s acted. When she is singing she is aware of what the song is doing, so it was easier than it should have been because of the team we had assembled. That is the easiest way to say it.

Awards Daily: Another scene I noticed is when they are singing “For the Sake of a Child” at the end of the play. Meryl Streep is almost fighting Martin Short in song and he occasionally switches to Paul Rudd. So you have multiple people switching up who’s singing the song. What was that like?

Micha Liberman: Paul Rudd there is not actually really there, so when it’s who and how it’s put together there ended up being a lot of versions of that scene. All of it was about serving the story, and so John Hoffman really guided us towards telling the story the best way we could there. It is really fun to have all these masterful performances to play with. There was a lot of throwing the baby out with the bath water, some really great moments that I wish could have made the final cut that didn’t. Every facial expression Paul Rudd makes is hilarious, and everything Meryl Streep does is intentional. There isn’t a performance that you want to cut, especially when you’re doing that kind of complex intercutting. It really in the end was about telling the best version of the story.

Awards Daily: You mentioned Paul Rudd’s face and I’m just thinking about the cookie eating scene, how it is funny and yet incredibly tragic in the same moment. I really liked that scene.

Micha Liberman: There were a lot of discussions about people having eating disorders. Paul Rudd was being very sensitive to not be offensive and still be funny. To still make a serious point of what it’s like to really struggle with that. But he is Paul Rudd, so he’s also hilarious.

Awards Daily: One thing I’m always curious about with any show is that the theme song is interplayed within the show a lot. How do you guys come to the decision about when that should be brought back into the show? Is it planned out far in advance, or do you just kind of see that the scene looks like the right time to bring that back?

Micha Liberman: So there are a lot of themes in Only Murders in the Building. In each season when we get new characters, they get their own themes, and they all have variations and subtle twists and turns. What we try to do is (it’s the same thing coming up again) use the music to tell the story as best we can. There are a lot of different ways you can use music in the television show. You can use it to make scenes go faster and a lot of comedies use it to say here comes a commercial. In Only Murders in the Building we try to avoid all those utilitarian uses of music and really try to tie the music to the story. So what theme goes in what scene really ties to what character is in that scene, or what part of the show we are on, like are we moving the mystery forward here or are we having an emotional scene between father and son here.

All of those things are very thematic, and composer Siddhartha Khosla is very intentional with his themes, and is involved in the process much earlier than normal. On a lot of television shows the picture editor, when they are editing, will put in what we call temp score, just whatever music helps them edit the picture. Then that gets thrown away and replaced by the final score. We try even in the temping phase to match the right themes to the right scenes in the show. Even if we are going to take that piece of music and reimagine it and re-record it with the orchestra, which we do every week. We still try from very early on in the cuts to make sure that the right musical themes are in the right places to tell the story.

Awards Daily: I think it definitely comes across, especially emotionally when the murderers were caught, and they’ve had creepy kisses all season, and in that moment with the music playing it has a tenderness to it. It feels tragic at that moment.

Micha Liberman: One of the sort of lucky things about Only Murders in the Building is that it’s hilarious people doing a serious story. They are investigating murders! So the music tries to stay on the emotional side of the story. You do not need to put funny music behind Steve Martin or Martin Short to tell a joke. They have got it, they’re going to make you laugh. The music can really serve the story and the emotion. I think that’s one of the reasons the show has so much depth.

Awards Daily: We talked about how this is the most difficult season you’ve had to do. Was there a moment that you were particularly proud of or stood out for you this season?

Micha Liberman: I think the Pickwick Triplets song, the final version where Steve Martin’s on camera the whole time, and he gives this just perfect performance. Making sure that I gave the audience the best version of that and making sure that that was living up to the perfect performance that Steve gave us was a lot of work. The way that came out I thought was really great. There was another tiny moment. There’s a scene when we are panning outside the theater and we hear the orchestra warming up. Then we cut inside the theater and see the orchestra warming up and then the camera pans away.

Throughout the whole cut it was just a sound effect of an orchestra warming up, and it was bothering me! So I went back to the original recordings of an orchestra in New York that did all the Broadway songs and stole all the pieces where the musicians were warming up before they started recording. I watched it to see when they were playing a little bit of the theme and I watched each musician’s hand to make certain what I was doing for the harp player matched the harp player, and the drummer matched the drummer, etc. So I went one musician at a time and thought about what they would be doing when they were warming up. I spent way too much time on this, and when it was done I turned on all the tracks and watched it and thought it couldn’t look more real. I thought no one would ever know about that (now they will, thanks to you!) and nobody asked for this, but the sound effect was just bugging me and that’s just a little secret moment of mine that I feel really good about.

Only Murders In the Building streams exclusively on Hulu.