Andrew W.K. wants you to unleash your inner party at his actual party

The music website LoudWire frequently hosts rock musicians for a video series called “Wikipedia: Fact or Fiction,” in which various claims of dubious merit are culled from that artist’s page and either confirmed or dispelled.

During a phone interview with The Salt Lake Tribune to preview his show Friday night at the Metro Music Hall in Salt Lake City, rocker and self-proclaimed “King of Partying” Andrew W.K. (aka Andrew Fetterly Wilkes-Krier) addressed a few of his notorious entries.

His father is a well-known legal scholar and his mother is a concert violinist?

“She’s not a violinist — I’ve seen that up on different bios,” he said. “That has been a persistent … I mean, I wish she was a violinist. I think, more than anything, she wishes she was a violinist. But she’ll settle for being the world’s greatest mom.”

That one can’t hold a candle, though, to what is arguably one of the most bonkers lines to appear on a musician’s Wiki page:

In 2012, it was believed that the U.S. State Department had named W.K. the U.S. Cultural Ambassador to Bahrain.

“Yes, yes! That is true,” he exclaimed.

Wait — the Andrew W.K. known for songs such as “It’s Time to Party,” “Party Hard” and “Party Til You Puke”? The Andrew W.K. whose 2001 album, “I Get Wet,” features a picture of him bleeding profusely after allegedly smacking himself in the face with a brick in order to get an evocative cover shot?

OK, looks like story time is in order.

“They give a slightly different take on what actually happened, and I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt, although I don’t think they deserve the benefit of the doubt,” W.K. said. “But the short story is that a gentleman who was in charge of organizing cultural exchange events in the Middle East had reached out to my manager. … Everything got greenlit and approved, and I was gonna go to Bahrain, a place I’d never been, and meet with young people there, students. I don’t think I was actually even going to play music, I was just going to talk with them and go to school with them for the day, and talk about my experiences as a rock musician and as an American, and have a hopefully peaceful and mutually beneficial exchange. And once we were officially given permission to announce the trip, it all just came crashing down. I think what had happened was that the trip had been planned and approved by some lower levels of the State Department, but once it was announced, someone — we were told it was the second in charge under Hillary Clinton — had seen the photo of my bloody-nose picture, which is sort of like my logo, I guess, and said, ‘We can’t send this person on anything representing the United States in any official capacity. Look at his picture. Look at his song titles about partying. This is not appropriate.’ And they canceled the whole trip.

“I was very upset, I was very hurt. I was really excited about it, I thought I was going to do a very good job, and I was quite disappointed that my own country was embarrassed to send me as a representative, because of something I thought of as so shallow, really judging a book by its cover,” he added. “They didn’t really take the time — these higher-ups that canceled the trip — to take a look at who I was or what I did. I understood, of course, why they canceled, but that’s why it seemed so absurd that they ever offered it to me in the first place. … In the end, if a cultural ambassadorship is to inspire conversation or get people talking about culture and parts of the world, this probably achieved more with the way that it went than actually if I had gone.”

The thing is, W.K. is, in fact, more than the sum of his stereotypes.

He’s a classically trained pianist. His all-time favorite piece of music is George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue.” He’s become an in-demand speaker on the lecture circuit.

And yes, he speaks and sings about partying. But you’ve never heard such an erudite explanation on espousing the virtues of partying in your life.

In recalling the experience of being exposed to music he loved early on, he noted, “that feeling was so undeniably good, was so joyful, so righteous that you … can’t imagine not feeling that way again, and you quickly orient yourself towards that feeling. And I had to start finding a way to describe that feeling myself, or identify that feeling, and to me, it became sort of quickly described as this partying feeling, the feeling that you were celebrating life itself. And I think that, in a way, I found music to be a celebration, or even an amplification of the life force, like getting to feel alive in all the textures that it has to offer. … And trying to use that feeling as a foundation or almost as a fuel source to experience life, to use that good feeling as a way to have the strength to experience life, to not just get through life, but to revel in life. That seemed like maybe it could be a career! Ha! I don’t know! But I wanted to be in this state of mind as much as I could, and promoting this state of mind, and promoting this feeling, this euphoric kind of feeling. And I think anyone who’s a very young child to a much older person can understand that feeling as ‘partying’ — even if they don’t like partying or they think they don’t like partying, they understand what it’s meant to imply. It’s meant to imply an acknowledgment of goodness, of freeness, a feeling of being free, and a kind of undeniable feeling that even though life is very intense, it’s still worth living.”

Now, he’s looking to espouse that in yet more musical forms.

He just announced that his first full-length album in more than a decade will be released March 2, 2018. He’ll perform some of those tunes at Friday night’s show, where he’ll be backed by a full band.

In the meantime, he’s grateful that fans are still giving him the chance to spread the gospel of partying.

“I never intended for it to be such a long and formal full-length album cycle. So once I realized that much time had gone by, it was quite frightening, quite shocking, quite sobering for me, and I realized, ‘Wow, I’ve got to do things while I can do things,’ ” he said. “I would like this to begin the prime era of productivity, of prolific musicmaking and playing. And I feel more driven and determined than ever before and very thankful that I even have a chance to be doing anything after this many years. It’s been 15, 16 years, and every year that’s gone by has been a gift, and I take this entire opportunity — what’s the best way to say this? — I don’t take any of it for granted, and every year that’s passed, I take it less and less and less for granted.”