‘Only Murders in the Building’ Songwriters Benj Pasek and Justin Paul Join the EGOT Club

Benj Pasek and Justin Paul are now officially members of the EGOT club. On Night 2 of the Creative Arts Emmys, the duo won Outstanding Original Music and Lyrics for the “Only Murders in the Building” song “Which of the Pickwick Triplets Did It?”, sharing the honor with co-writers Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman. (Earlier in the evening, their “Only Murders” colleague Siddhartha Khosla won for original dramatic score.)

Pasek and Paul are the twentieth and twenty-first people to EGOT — and the second and third this year, after Elton John took home an Emmy in January for his 2022 Disney+ variety special “Elton John Live: Farewell From Dodger Stadium.” The 18 other members of the illustrious club include Helen Hayes, Rita Moreno, Audrey Hepburn, John Gielgud, Whoopi Goldberg, Mel Brooks, Mike Nichols, Tim Rice, Robert Lopez, Viola Davis, John Legend and Jennifer Hudson.

In the third season Hulu’s “Only Murders,” Steve Martin performs the tongue-twister of a tune as part of “Death Rattle Dazzle,” the short-lived musical about a trio of babies suspected of murder produced by Martin Short’s reliable generator of turkeys, Oliver Putnam.

In an interview with TheWrap in June, Pasek described the process of writing the song as a “roller coaster of insanity.”

“We’re really trying to home in on the DNA of that style of musical that Oliver Putnam would create, given all of his various Broadway outings,” he said. “It also has to exist in the context of the show ‘Only Murders in the Building,’ and each song has to play in a parallel track.”

Pasek and Paul — who won Oscars for “La La Land,” Tonys for “A Strange Loop” and “Dear Evan Hansen,” and Grammys for “Dear Evan Hansen” and “The Greatest Showman” — teamed up with fellow multi-award victors Shaiman and Wittman (“Hairspray”).

“We’d never written with them before but we got in the room with them and just had the most enjoyable time trying to come up with the most insane, complex [song] full of plosives, full of alliteration,” Pasek told TheWrap. “Something that could be from ‘The Music Man’ but also meshed with the world of Oliver Putnam.”

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