You're listening to Song Exploder where musicians take apart their songs and piece by piece tell the story of how they were made. I'm Rishikesh Herway.

Just a quick note before we start since this is an episode about a TV show, you know, Song Exploder is a podcast about creativity.

We stand with the WGA and SAG After and the creativity that those unions support. Okay, here we go.

The Skip Intro button first got introduced to us through Netflix in 2017 and I know a lot of people use it, including me.

But if I can get into Old Man back in my day mode for a second, I have so much fondness for the opening theme music for so many shows.

It's a chance to set the mood for everything that you're about to see.

One of the intros that I never skip is the animated opening title sequence for only murders in the building,

which is a Hulu show that debuted in August 2021 and now is in its third season.

It was created by Steve Martin and John Hoffman and it stars Steve Martin, Martin Short and Selena Gomez.

The three of them play neighbors who live in the same building in New York and they're all obsessed with the same true crime podcast.

And then when someone in their building gets murdered, they decide to start their own true crime podcast and try and solve the mystery of who the killer is.

For this episode, I talked to composer Siddhartha Kostla about the show's theme music.

Coming up, you'll hear a voice memo that Siddhartha recorded before he'd ever even heard about the show, which then led to a demo that you'll hear and then eventually the final theme.

My name is Siddhartha Kostla and I'm the composer for only murders in the building.

I had spent six seasons working with Dan Fulgelman who created This Is Us.

Dan reached out to me and said, hey, I want to get you in touch with John Hoffman, who's going to be show running the show and co-created only murders with Steve Martin.

Let's just see if you guys hit it off.

And in the meantime, I'm going to send you a script and see what you think.

And it totally blew me away. It was funny. It was dramatic. It was deeper than sort of your normal comedy.

I wrote a note back to Dan. Only murders is magic. And that led to my meeting with John Hoffman.

We're firmly in the pandemic at that point. And a lot of productions had stopped for this period.

And I decided to write my own sort of instrumental classical record. I'm not a classically trained musician.

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