Heading into this year’s Emmy nomination process, the Crazy Ex-Girlfriend songwriting team — which includes the show’s co-creator and star, Rachel Bloom, as well as executive music producer Adam Schlesinger and music consultant/staff writer Jack Dolgen — planned to submit four tunes for awards consideration. But as the deadline approached, Schlesinger knew there was one surefire winner from the show’s second season: a tap-dancing ditty called “We Tapped That Ass.” Performed by Vincent Rodriguez III and Santino Fontana in their finest Gene Kelly/Donald O’Connor form, the song is a roll call of all the places where Bloom’s troubled heroine, Rebecca Bunch, has had sex with the two men in her life: buff Josh (Rodriguez) and emo Greg (Fontana). Why did Schlesinger know the tune would resonate with Emmy voters? Simple: “Everyone just likes the word ass!” the Fountains of Wayne bassist tells Yahoo TV. “It’s a crowdpleaser.”

Sure enough, “We Tapped that Ass” is the most eye-catching title amongst the six nominees for Outstanding Original Music and Lyrics. (For the record, the trio also submitted the hilarious Marilyn Monroe pastiche “The Math of Love Triangles,” which didn’t make the final cut.) It’s the second year in a row that Crazy Ex-Girlfriend has been represented in this category, with the Season 1 favorite “Settle For Me” getting a nod last year. Sadly, because this award is presented at the non-televised Creative Arts Emmy Awards, we won’t get to see Rodriguez and Fontana (whose character left the show midway through Season 2) sing lyrics like “I banged you here, I nailed you there” and “On the table you were willing and able” in front of such nominated actors as Robert De Niro and Jessica Lange on Emmy night. But the song’s writers are still giddily ass-tonished to be in the running for a second year.

Bloom, Schlesinger, and Dolgen filled us in on how “We Tapped that Ass” came to be and the two things about the song that network censors found too… cheeky.

What are the origins of “We Tapped that Ass”?

Rachel Bloom: We had known for a while that we wanted to do a “Moses Supposes“-style number, but dirtier. Like, “We f**ked you there, we f**ked you here.” [We liked] the idea of Rebecca being overwhelmed by her memories and the wordplay of her memories, and we had a lot of the internal jokes in the song thought up. As an internal joke, Jack pitched the line, “We tapped that ass all over this house.” And Adam and I were like, “F**k you, Jack, that’s the chorus!”

Adam Schlesinger: And then we beat the s**t out of Jack!

Jack Dolgen: It was really confusing. [Laughs]

Schlesinger: On the musical side, a lot of times, Rachel or Jack will send me something that’s [a] pretty-formed melody and I may or may not tweak it a little bit. With this one, we basically just kicked around jokes for a half an hour until I had a bunch to choose from. We didn’t have any kind of a melody. We were doing a little rhythm while improvising the jokes, so I took that and came up with the melody later.

Bloom: In another genre, it’s a song that could have felt, for lack of a better term, rapey. Because it’s in a playful genre, it’s threatening without being distractingly threatening. It helped knowing that Vincent and Santino have tap-dancing skills. It’s been fun to write to the skills of the actors on the show.

Dolgen: It doesn’t hurt that Vincent has every tertiary skill imaginable! He’s acrobatic, he does karate; I’m waiting for the unicycle juggling song.

Schlesinger: Rachel has telekinesis and we haven’t used that yet either.

You get away with some pretty filthy jokes in the song. Did you have any issues with the network?

Bloom: Every time we come up with a new song, we send the lyrics to S&P; everything also gets sent to S&P.

Schlesinger: That’s Salt-N-Pepa she’s referring to. They wrote “Push It.” We love their work.

Bloom: Sorry, Standards and Practices! [Laughs] We sent this song in and it mostly passed. The only thing that was problematic was the ending. Originally, the guys said, “Where should we finish? How about on her chest!” And S&P was like, “You can’t say this! Are you insane?” And I said, “Okay, what if Rebecca says, ‘Please not on my chest’ and then immediately adds, ‘You’ll scratch it.’ So she’s actually talking about the chest [in the house].