Interview with Siddhartha Khosla
Thursday / October 1, 2026
About Siddhartha Khosla
American composer of This Is Us and Only Murders in the Building, and singer and producer of the band Goldspot. He won an Emmy in 2024.
Source: Film.Music.Media on YouTube
These answers are taken from Composer Interview: Siddhartha Khosla on Film.Music.Media's YouTube channel. You! Backstage did not conduct this interview.
What was your very first experience with composing music?
My parents left India in the late 70s to move to the United States and build a life here, and I was born soon after that. They were in school full-time and working full-time at night, so they sent me back to India to be raised by my grandparents for the first few years of my life. So much of the music that I write even today is informed by those experiences, and particularly the Indian music that I heard growing up. When I came back to the United States, when I was around three or four, I was listening to all the music my parents had brought with them on cassette tapes from India.
At a young age my mom recognized that I had a voice and I could sing, and that I had good pitch, and she started writing lyrics to popular Indian songs for me. We would go to temple on Sundays, and my mom would be like, here, you're going to sing this for 150 Indian people. That was my introduction to music: singing Indian music in front of people. I spent the next several years of my life singing Indian music. It's all I did.
What drew you to a career as a composer?
In high school I met a bunch of wonderful friends, and they brought me into their band and introduced me to Western artists: the Cure and the Smiths and the Beatles and R.E.M. and the Police. So there were two parts of my musical upbringing, one part Indian, one part Western, and that shaped the way I wrote music. I started writing songs, and I started a band after college called Goldspot. We were on a label and toured, and that was wonderful.
Then in my early 30s I started thinking about a different path, and a producer and writer named Dan Fogelman called me and said, "Hey, would you like to score the second season of my television show called The Neighbors?" Dan and I were college buddies. He would come to shows and was a big fan of my music. I was reluctant, because I just didn't know if I could do it, to be honest. I had never really written for any visual media before. But I took that gig, and it was the best decision I made.
What was a great moment for you as a composer?
There's an episode midway through season one of This Is Us where Kate is in a weight-loss camp, and they're banging sticks on the ground, and she has a flashback to her childhood with her dad, and then we see this flashback to the funeral. It's the first time we've ever seen this, and it's a silent montage. And all of a sudden the score evolved into something Indian. That's where I really started playing my wooden table with my fingers. I was just basically watching it and noodling along, and I'm like, oh, maybe I should actually record this. Even some of the melodies started becoming a little more classical Indian, without me even realizing it. It was just happening.
And Dan told me that was a transformative moment in the score for the show. He's like, whatever happened there, that was a big moment. That unleashed this whole thing for the next couple of seasons. It wasn't me forcing it in. We talk about bringing your own artistry into your work: this is a perfect example of that.
How did your career as a composer unfold?
That first project was straight to network television, and we were on a crazy schedule, delivering 22 episodes of the show, working every week to deliver an orchestral score as well. A lot of people were like, who's this guy? We've never heard of him. But ultimately I guess people were happy with what we did. That was a huge learning lesson for me, and also a huge learning curve I had to overcome. But I did it.
After The Neighbors, I'd done a bunch of pilots for Dan that didn't go to series, and some comedies that had gone for other people. Then This Is Us came along, and he sent me the script for the pilot and said, write me something, whatever the script is making you feel. I had to audition for the role. It was a priority project for NBC, and there were some heavy-hitting directors, John Requa and Glenn Ficarra, Ken Olin, and everyone probably had their own people. So I had to really dig deep and earn it. I spent the next two days in the studio writing a six-and-a-half-minute piece of score, and Dan loved it, and the producers loved it, and the directors loved it, and I was fortunate enough to get hired.
What advice do you have for new composers?
Early on in my career, my music was discovered by DJs on KCRW in Los Angeles, which was like a dream station to get my music played on. Nic Harcourt discovered me on the radio. When I was given this thumbs-up early on in my career to say, hey, keep on doing what you're doing, because it's cool, it's slightly outside the box, those little moments give you an incredible amount of confidence that you carry with you forever.
When I got involved in television and film, I made a concerted effort to maintain as much of my artistry as I possibly can. Because I've come in wearing my artistry shirt, saying I want to do something special and interesting here, I've started attracting producers and writers that want the same from me. It's a self-fulfilling thing. I put it out there that I want to do interesting work that I'm proud of as much as possible, but still serve the needs of the show and the directors and the producers.
How do you keep communication clear with directors and music supervisors?
On any project I work on, I request that there's not a single ounce of temp score that I ever get to see, unless the producers or the writers and creators of the show or movie have something very specific in mind, which I don't find that often.
The key to finding the sound of any show is knowing what the producer's musical sensibility is. If you introduce something that is too foreign sonically, that they're not used to, sometimes that might not work. How far left of center do they go? How centered do they want to be? I knew from the beginning, based on the directors that were involved and Dan, that this was going to be a different kind of show. It was going to feel like a film. And I knew that Dan wanted to use a Sufjan Stevens song in the pilot, so that guided me a little bit.
I even had a conversation with Dan one time. I said, "Hey man, is the music getting too Indian for you?" And he was like, "No, keep on doing what you're doing." That was encouraging to hear.
Who is your favorite composer, and why?
My favorite composers are the ones that have unique voices. There are so many talented composers that can do so many different types of genres and do them well, but the composers that I look up to are the ones that have a unique voice, where you can almost hear the score and you're like, I bet you this person did it. You can hear an Alexandre Desplat score from a mile away, just like you could hear a John Williams score from a mile away. There's something identifiable.
Describe your musical style.
Because I knew we were going to be jumping around in multiple timelines on This Is Us, I had to find something that was timeless, that didn't have a time stamp on it. So I opted for something organic, instruments that I could play on my own or make on my own. The acoustic guitar is a perfect example of an instrument that could have been around 80 years ago and will be around 100 more. Even the percussion: I play all the percussion on the show on my wooden table, all with my fingers. And there's a cellist, Ginger Murphy, a beautiful player, who plays all over the score.
I do a lot of listening. I will start with my acoustic guitar sometimes and just play along with the dialogue, to find a rhythm and a pace first, and then weave in the melodies at the right time. You could easily go big and sweeping with an orchestra, and it might read as schmaltzy. But if I let my fingers do the work and keep the score in a place that lives under the skin a little more and shines when it's supposed to shine, it all feels more tasteful. I try not to turn in any musical cue unless I feel a little tingle in my spine. That's my litmus test.
Tell me about a cue or score that was hard to get right. What was the project and why was it challenging?
This season of This Is Us was wildly epic with the score. We had an entire Vietnam story that required me to score battle scenes in Vietnam. Jack always said he lost his brother in Vietnam, but his brother ended up surviving Vietnam. Their relationship did not survive Vietnam. There's an episode where the brother is high as a kite on a little canoe with a little Vietnamese boy, and a grenade falls out of his hand, and the boat explodes, and the kid gets blown up. And I'm scoring this entire massive sequence of that happening. I had to completely stretch this season and go into a completely different space.
I was creating the sound of tinnitus by bowing on my vibraphone. It was really uncomfortable and unsettling, and it felt authentic to the moment. There was an explosion, a little boy just died, it was tense. It was maybe one of the most tense pieces of score I've ever written.
Siddhartha Khosla's Full Biography
Siddhartha Khosla is an Emmy Award-winning film and television composer, singer/songwriter, and producer of the critically acclaimed band, Goldspot.
In 2024 Khosla received an Emmy for his work on Hulu's critically acclaimed series, Only Murders In The Building, in the "Outstanding Music Composition For a Series" category.
In 2022, Khosla received three Emmy nominations, two for his work on Only Murders In The Building in the "Outstanding Original Main Title Music" and "Outstanding Music Composition For a Series" categories, and an additional nomination for "Outstanding Original Music and Lyrics" for his #1 Billboard-charting song "The Forever Now" (shared with Dawes' Taylor Goldsmith) from NBC's Emmy-winning drama series, This Is Us.
In 2019 and 2021, he received Emmy nominations for his work on This Is Us for "Outstanding Music Composition For a Series" and in 2020 for "Outstanding Original Music and Lyrics" for the original song "Memorized."
Khosla has the distinction of being the first Asian person in history to win a Primetime Emmy for original score.
Upcoming projects include Skydance Animation film's POOKOO, directed by Nathan Greno; Amazon Studios' OH.WHAT. FUN, directed by Michael Showalter; Dan Fogelman-created Hulu drama Paradise; Netflix's No Good Deed; and Season 2 of the CBS Drama Elsbeth.
Recent credits include Amazon Studios' THE IDEA OF YOU, directed by Michael Showalter; Netflix's romantic comedy A FAMILY AFFAIR, directed by Richard LaGravenese; the Reese Witherspoon-starring Netflix romantic comedy YOUR PLACE OR MINE directed by Aline Brosh McKenna; Paramount+'s Rabbit Hole; Hulu's limited series Welcome to Chippendales; Paramount+'s comedy film QUEENPINS, directed by Aron Gaudet and Gita Pullapilly; Amazon studios' dramedy film I WANT YOU BACK, directed by Jason Orley; and more.
In November 2013, Khosla was invited as the musical guest for First Lady Michelle Obama's Diwali celebration at the White House, where he delivered an emotional performance of several of his original songs.
He has also been performing his music from This Is Us for audiences worldwide. In 2019, he performed in Los Angeles at the Ford Theatre and at the MOSMA Festival in Málaga, Spain.