One of the best things about the Jimmy Fallon show — maybe the best thing — is that it’s a test of ingenuity every single day. It sent me back to the days of working with Dave Chappelle. But that show was brilliant guerrilla comedy; it happened on the fly and then some. The Fallon show is a day job in the best sense. We’re in by noon and gone by seven, and in between we make a show. It’s highly structured, and as a result, the opportunities we have for creativity are really distilled: not reduced at all, but disciplined, forced into existing forms and packages. “Freestylin’ with the Roots” is one of the highlights for us. One of the others is the walkover.

The walkover, or walk-on, for those who don’t speak backstage, is the song that the band plays as a guest comes out from behind the curtain and walks over to the host’s desk. Once upon a time, maybe, it was straightforward, a little musical cue or song associated with the artist. But then came Paul Shaffer’s work on “Letterman,” and the walkover became its own little art form — an obscure musical reference that the audience (and sometimes even the guest) had to decode.

From the beginning, I wanted the Fallon walk-ons to be classics of the genre, the talk-show equivalent of video game Easter eggs. When we had Salma Hayek on the show, rather than play “Mexican Radio” or even “Salmon Falls,” we did some Internet research and unearthed the theme song from the first Mexican soap opera she ever starred on, “Theresa.” She knew it faintly at first, or at least knew it was something she should know, and her eyes went wide when she figured out what it was. When Edward Norton was on, promoting “The Bourne Legacy,” we played Patrick Hernandez’s 1979 disco hit “Born to be Alive.” And we thought we had a great left-field pick when we played the Dave Matthews Band’s “The Space Between” for football player Michael Strahan, but somehow he knew it immediately. Howard Stern once came up to me during a bathroom break, confused, to ask me why we played this disco song by Bell and James for his wife, Beth Ostrovsky. “She’s from Pittsburgh, right?” I asked. He nodded. I explained that everyone from Pittsburgh gets that treatment — it’s a band in-joke that refers back to the late-’70s basketball comedy “The Fish That Saved Pittsburgh.” I’m not sure he was satisfied by the answer. The Fallon walkovers, as trivial as they may seem, have been the culmination of everything I’ve cared about my whole life: making strange musical connections, reveling in the way that something obscure can illuminate something obvious.

Because the songs we select are a kind of code, some of the guys in the band use them to slyly flirt with female guests. I let Kirk talk me into playing The Lonely Island’s “Lazy Sunday” for Christina Ricci because he had heard she has a “Chronicle of Narnia” tattoo on her back. I did it but got no reaction at all. I put him on six-month probation for that suggestion; he was forbidden to send any more secret messages to anyone. And I can remember one case where I totally fumbled the ball. We had a famous actress on — I won’t say who, to protect both myself and her — and I thought she had been in a particular movie, and I built the walk-on around that title. After the show, her publicist came up to me. “Hey,” she said, “what was the walkover song? I’m not sure I understood the reference.” I had confused her with someone else. I was so embarrassed.

But even in the walk-on world, there are limits. Chuck Berry may be the inventor of rock and roll, but he still thinks he needs a pay-out of $2.5 million anytime anyone plays “Johnny B. Goode” on TV. That seemed to scotch our plan to play it when Michael J. Fox came on the show; we wanted to recreate the prom scene from “Back to the Future” — you know, where Marty McFly plays the “Johnny B. Goode” solo and one of the guys in the band, Marvin Berry , calls his cousin Chuck? Rather than give up, though, we found a workaround. We played “The Clock,” by my father, which is basically a B-flat blues ripoff of the Berry Classic, and that gave us the solo we needed. I played the role of Marvin Berry in the skit.

Most of the time, the walk-on is harmless and fun, a way to flex our musical and pop-culture muscles. But there are times when it gives us a chance to practice a bit of commentary. When Ashlee Simpson was on, we played a Milli Vanilli song to tweak her a little bit for her lip-synching scandal on “Saturday Night Live.” (Viewers with sharp ears may have noticed that we didn’t even do the original song, but the version from VH1’s “Behind the Music,” where Fab and Rob were stuck singing the title phrase because of a computer glitch.)

And then, in late 2011 — November 21, to be exact, at the height of the Republican primary season — we found out that Michele Bachmann, representative from Minnesota, was coming on the show. Bachmann had been offending people left and right with her comments about gay rights and Muslims in America, and she also seemed to have a casual relationship with the truth. I learned that at one point fact-checkers had set a time limit for themselves on how many of her evasions and misrepresentations they were going to catch. That was my starting point, and I set out on a mission to find the best song about politics and evasion and untruth. I considered “Lies,” either the En Vogue one or the McFly one, but we don’t generally sing any lyrics, so I ended up picking Fishbone’s “Lyin’ Ass Bitch,” a ska number from their 1985 debut. It had a good little melody and lots of energy. It seemed funny to me. I figured it would be another exhibit in Ahmir’s Hall of Snark, and not much more than that.

So that’s what happened. Michele Bachmann came out on to the show and spoke to Jimmy. She didn’t know what song we were playing. I’m sure almost no one knew what song we were playing. That was part of the fun of it. I felt smug to the point of smugness. We had pulled one over on the Man.

Then, the next day, satisfaction and smugness turned to ego. I was sitting around at home thinking that I had done something historical, something political. I had struck a blow for truth. I wanted credit. When you want credit for something and you don’t want to operate via traditional channels, where do you go? In this day and age, you go to Twitter. That’s where I went. Someone tweeted me a question: “Was that ‘Lyin’ Ass Bitch’?” I answered like someone in the grip of ego, which is exactly what it was: “Sho’ nuf.” That was it. The fuse was lit. The news began to spread. Then a conservative blogger got hold of it and it spread some more. I went to sleep, and woke to a reverse tooth fairy situation. Instead of finding money under my pillow, I found my phone flashing with six missed calls, all from my manager Rich. I had a sense, maybe, what it was about, so I looked on Twitter and saw that I had more than seven hundred mentions. Then I called Rich back.

“You know this is a problem,” he said.

“How much of a problem?”

“Looks like this could be a big problem.”

“How big?”

Rich paused. I didn’t like the pause or what was in it. “I don’t know,” he said. “This could be a wrap for you. This could be a wrap for us.” My heart sank. Had I taken the band down with me?