'Only Murders in the Building' composer says theme song was influenced by 'old Hindi music'

Composer Siddhartha Khosla broke down the creation of the catchy opening theme song for Hulu’s original series “Only Murders in the Building” in a recent podcast interview, detailing his influences from Hindi music and New York City culture.

In an episode of “Song Exploder,” a podcast where musicians share how their songs are made, Khosla said he wrote the theme song for the murder-mystery series during the thick of the pandemic with inspiration from his childhood.

“Old Hindi music, music my parents brought to this country when they came here, and I lived in India as a kid… If you listen to that music, it’s all about the melody,” he said to host Hrishikesh Hirway on the episode that was posted Wednesday. “And so I grew up dreaming in melody, and thinking in melody, and writing in melody. So this had that.”

Khosla expanded on his background in an email to NBC News, saying, “When [my] parents came to the US from India in the late 1970s, they brought with them cassette tapes of 1960’s Indian film songs from legends like Kishore Kumar, Mukesh, Mohd. Rafi, and Lata Mangeshkar.”

“I learned how to sing by learning these songs, and then performing them for my parents and their friends at parties. Those melodies were hauntingly beautiful and catchy, and to this day influence the way I write,” Khosla said.

The Emmy-nominated show follows three tenants in the Arconia, an iconic building in Manhattan’s Upper West Side: Charles-Haden Savage (Steve Martin), Oliver Putnam (Martin Short) and Mabel Mora (Selena Gomez). The trio become unlikely friends and create a popular true-crime podcast while trying to solve deadly mysteries in their affluent apartment building. The series is currently airing its third season, which premiered this month.

The 51-second theme song plays behind an animated sequence of the Arconia and shows its tenants in the windows of the building during the day and transitions to a similar sequence at night.

During the episode, Khosla, who is the show’s music composer, said the show’s co-creator John Hoffman was ecstatic about the track.

“He was like, ‘This is exactly the tone of my show. That’s my main theme right there,” Khosla said. “He’s like, ‘No, that’s it. It makes me feel happy. It makes me feel sad. I feel mystery. I feel comedy. I feel intrigue. It feels very New York to me. And I want you to finish it.’”

After adding vocals, piano, a snare drum and a mellotron, he said Hoffman told him to make it “even more New York.”

“In our conversations, John would always talk about the dichotomy of rich and poor in New York City. That as you’re walking down a block in New York City, you know, you see incredible amounts of wealth. And then you also see abject poverty,” Khosla said.

He reached out to drummer John McAlister, who used paint buckets and tree branches to mimic the sound of drums played on buckets in subway stations. Other sounds were also incorporated for more movement, Khosla said. A cello was added, along with screeches, which he said were meant to sound like cats discovering “danger.”

A shorter version of the song is also used when a character discovers something or a clue is found.

“...the presence of that melody… if you closed your eyes and you watched the show, the score can also tell you a little bit about what’s happening,” he said.