The composer for 'This Is Us' once worried his score sounded 'too Indian.' But the emotional music rooted in his own upbringing is at the heart of the show.

• Dan Fogelman brought on his friend, composer Siddhartha Khosla, to create the "This Is Us" score.
• Khosla's Indian upbringing comes through in the show's music and he once wondered if it was "weird."
• The deeply personal score only enhances the show's emotional resonance - for Fogelman and viewers.

When "This Is Us" creator Dan Fogelman first approached his friend, composer Siddhartha Khosla, to create the music for the series, he knew Khosla would be able to create a unique score for the show. But neither of them expected that it would end up being so rooted in Khosla's own upbringing in India.

In fact, the veteran composer was initially worried about how much his culture's sounds had come through in his music for the NBC series.

At some point while composing the show's first season, Khosla told Insider he remembered going to Fogelman and asking, "'Hey, is this score too Indian? Is this weird?'"

"Almost half of what I'm doing is classical Indian instruments, but I'm running them through effects and reverbs and treating them so they become sort of these wall of sound, atmospheric things," said the composer. "I don't think anyone would have predicted that that could have been the sound of a hit drama on NBC."

That Indian influence begins to come into the score particularly in season 1 episode 13, when Kate recalls Jack's funeral. Khosla remembered how Fogelman called the music in that episode "transformative" and said to him, "'You found the sound of the show right there.'"

Hearing that the score for "This Is Us" is deeply personal to its composer is no surprise. The show is known for its emotionally moving moments, and Khosla's music has played an invaluable role in shaping the series into the beloved drama it has become.

Speaking to Insider, Khosla opened up about how he came to work on "This Is Us," what goes into creating its distinctly emotional music, and how the sound has evolved over the course of its five-season run.

Fogelman first tapped Khosla, his old college roommate, to work on another earlier show of his before 'This Is Us'

Khosla and Fogelman first met during their freshman year of college and have been friends ever since. Both moved to Los Angeles after finishing college, but were on very different career paths.

"Our work lives never converged. They were always separate. I was in a band, he was writing scripts," Khosla said. Eventually, that changed, starting with the ABC series "The Neighbors."

"I had been touring and releasing albums, and also was being hit with the reality that streaming was starting to really affect artists' revenues," he told Insider. "My first album was released, and frankly, it was a bit of a disappointment when it came out."

So when Fogelman offered him the chance to score "The Neighbors," Khosla decided to go for it. That kicked off a long and fruitful working relationship between the two old friends.

"I started doing almost everything he started doing in TV," Khosla said. "He called me when he had the pilot episode written for 'This Is Us,' and they had just started filming it. And he was like, 'I think I have something special here.'"

Khosla read Fogelman's script for the pilot episode, then wrote a six-and-a-half-minute piece of music based on that script alone.

"I spent two nights recording it. I put a lot of work into it," he recalled.

Khosla's work is inspired by his family and by Fogelman's real-life experience of grief

As many fans know, the show is deeply personal to Fogelman and partly inspired by his own life.

"Dan lost his mom when he was young, kind of like the Pearsons lost their dad when they were young. Obviously, Dan was older than the Pearson kids. And he's openly talked about it as sort of the thing that has really informed how he's written this show," Khosla said. "So, for me, sometimes I'm actually scoring the show for him as much as I am for the characters on the screen."

He continued: "We've seen each other at some of our most vulnerable points in our lives. He's seen me at some of the lowest moments of my life, and I've seen him at some of the lowest moments of his life. So, we know each other and so there is a trust there."

Their friendship and that deep level of trust also allowed Khosla to be able to use inspiration from his own childhood for the score, as mentioned earlier. Khosla said "This Is Us," to him, is about the "larger connectivity of life."

"It's about decisions that people in your family have made that might've been small, but ended up having an impact on you ultimately, and then, because it has an impact on you, it has an impact on the people that follow you," he said.

Khosla grew up in India while his parents were working to make a life in the United States in the 1970s. He explained how that experience also inspires the sounds he uses for "This Is Us."

"Had my parents not moved here in the '70s - I know it sounds small, but would I ever have met my wife and had my kids?" Khosla said. "And would I ever have worked on 'This Is Us?' I mean, it's all these things. That these choices people make have just profound impacts on you."

"And so, for me, that's my inspiration - my own family's history and my family's story that I can sort of weave into the music," he added.

The series' sound has continued to develop and evolve over the course of 6 seasons - particularly with Randall's theme

"There's a subtlety to how I'm getting the emotion out. I'm not sort of hitting you over the head with big sweeping epic strings and the things that you normally hear to pull emotion out of you," Khosla explained. "I'm really trying to be as nuanced as possible. I'm playing to the dialogue a lot."

He said he interprets each actors' monologues as though they are the lead singer, and he's supporting them with music.

"On some of these emotional scenes, I don't turn in any score until I feel a tingle in my spine," Khosla told Insider.

From the most recent season, one moment in particular that stands out is centered on Randall.

"I'm quite proud of the work that we did on the birth mother episode, which was the episode where Randall and Beth go to find out about Randall's birth mother, Laurel," Khosla said. "Randall goes on this spiritual journey to find his mother that he never knew, in a way. And she had already died, but he was finding her. I really connected to that one."

That episode brought an earlier musical theme of Randall's back in a big way.

On the season 5 episode, Randall runs into the water and sees his mother in what Khosla describes as a "meditative" moment.

"She tells him, 'There's so much pain in your eyes,' and she's like, 'You just have to let it go." He screams and has a huge moment of catharsis and growth. And I bring in the most sweeping version of Randall's theme we've heard to date," he said.

Viewers might not have realized that's actually a theme the audience had already heard, at least partially, early on in the series.

"That theme, you've heard hinted melodically in season 1 when Randall has his anxiety attack and Kevin comes to his side," Khosla said. "It just felt pretty powerful to hear the same type of theme you heard at his low point was also now heard at his high point."