Siddhartha Khosla knows this moment won’t last forever, which is probably why he’s squeezing every ounce out of it. When we spoke, the composer behind This Is Us sounded equal parts grateful, exhausted, and quietly stunned by how fast everything had moved.
“It’s been crazy,” he said early on, still sounding like he was talking himself into believing it. “I’m trying to enjoy every second of it as much as I can, because I know this is rare.”
What makes Khosla’s run especially strange is that it arrived after a whole other career. Before television scoring became his full-time reality, he was fronting the indie-rock project Goldspot, touring, making albums, living inside songs for years at a time. The shift wasn’t so much a reinvention as a compression.
“With an album, I could spend a couple years making one record,” he said. “Here, I feel like I’m making an album every single week.”
That’s not hyperbole. This Is Us runs on an unforgiving schedule — eighteen episodes per season, a new one constantly in motion. “You work on an episode, you finish it, you move on,” he explained. “I’m working on a new episode every week.”
The emotional shift is just as dramatic. “With my band, I’m writing about my own personal experiences,” Khosla said. “My family’s experiences coming to this country in 1976 with eight dollars in their pockets. Their American Dream story. My story as their child.” On This Is Us, the job is different. “I’m helping Dan Fogelman see his vision — and helping millions of people connect to it.”
That vision came into focus before a single frame was shot. Fogelman sent Khosla the pilot script and asked a simple question: read it, see if it inspires anything. “I picked up my acoustic guitar and just started plucking while I was reading,” Khosla said. “I realized immediately the sound of the show needed to feel classic and timeless.”
He started pulling from a deep, emotional well: Joni Mitchell, Nick Drake, The Beatles — but also modern touchstones that feel equally lived-in. “Something that could exist today,” he said, “but also something that feels like it’s always been there.”
The result is an intentionally human score. “Everything you hear is really just full of love,” he said. “I play percussion on my wooden desk. I put a microphone up to it and record my fingers tapping on the table. I sing on it, too.” It’s music that breathes, that creaks a little, that feels like it’s being made in the same rooms as the characters who live with it.
That attention to authenticity reached a peak with “We Can Always Come Back to This,” the faux-1970s soul hit written for the episode “Memphis.” “That was one of the most challenging things I’ve ever done,” Khosla admitted. The song needed to feel like a lost Stax single — not inspired by the era, but from it. “We wanted it to feel authentic and real and honest.”
So he brought in veteran players, people who’d lived inside that sound. “They play on soul records, Motown records,” he said. “That was key.”
The strangest part was when the song escaped the show. “When it came out, it actually became a bit of a hit,” he laughed. “Which is crazy.”
Maybe that’s the throughline in Khosla’s work — music made quietly, carefully, in service of story, that finds its own life anyway. He’s aware of the moment. He’s grateful for it. And he’s still, somehow, surprised by it.
Listen to the interview above and then check out "We Can Always Come Back To This" below!
