Seinfeld‘s iconic slap bass theme music — and a whole lot of more — has finally been released for the first time on an official soundtrack album for the show. “It was 30 years in the making,” Seinfeld composer Jonathan Wolff tells Variety. “It struggled for the first few seasons. We were an accidental hit. We were busy getting episodes out, and nobody was thinking about the music. And that’s OK.”

“What if we consider using your voice, telling jokes, as the melody of the theme?” Wolff told Jerry Seinfeld while coming up with the theme song. “My job will be to accompany you in a way that does not interfere with the audio of your standup routine. The organic nature of your human voice might go well with the organic nature of my lips, tongue and finger snaps, doing stuff like this [makes familiar Seinfeld] noises). He came over by himself, I put one of his monologues on the screen and showed him how I could build the music around it.”

“The bass line was designed to stay in a frequency range that didn’t interfere with his voice,” Wolff explains. “That slap-bass sound could start and stop to make audio holes for the timing of his jokes and his punchlines. It served as a kind of old-vaudeville rimshot for his jokes. It meant I was going to have to rebuild each piece of music for each monologue, to fit the timings and lengths, but that was OK with me. It helped give a signature to the show.”

Wolff says that NBC executives found the music “weird, distracting, and annoying.” He offered to come up with something else, but Larry David, the show’s co-creator and producer, refused. “Larry was deeply offended, and didn’t change anything,” Wolff adds, which, yeah, sounds like Larry David alright! You can stream the Seinfeld (Original Television Soundtrack) album below.

Seinfeld (Original Television Soundtrack) is out now via WaterTower Music.