“Is this a Jewish publication I’m talking to?” Kinky Friedman asks by phone from a casino in upstate New York. 

My reply is that the Jewish Light is at least the fourth Jewish publication to have interviewed him since what he calls his “spiritual Bataan death march” of 33 shows in 34 days began April 11. The loquacious country music troubadour, author, political and animal rescue activist, and tequila and cigar pitchman — reached on his one night off — chuckles.

“I know that,” says Friedman, who rode to fame and notoriety with his band the Texas Jewboys in the early ’70s. “I don’t know, maybe the Jewish publications are running out of Jews to interview.”

It is impossible to control a conversation with Friedman, whose songs include the classics “They Ain’t Makin’ Jews Like Jesus Anymore,” “Ride ’Em Jewboy” (about the Holocaust), “Wild Man of Borneo” (he served there in the Peace Corps) and “Get Your Biscuits in the Oven and Your Buns in the Bed.”

But somehow, an interview still manages to cover most of the questions that never specifically get asked as Friedman veers from topic to topic: his many projects, music, spirituality, writing books and mystery novels, Winston Churchill, Nelson Mandela and, of course, politics. 

After all, Friedman is a guy who unsuccessfully ran for governor of Texas as an independent in 2006 under a slogan he credits to pal Willie Nelson: “Criticize him all you want, just don’t circumcise him anymore.”

Friedman — “I’m 72 years old but I read at the 74-year-old level” — returns to St. Louis on May 11 to play his friend Bill Christman’s intimate listening room, Joe’s Cafe, in the Central West End. He’s played there before, and he likes it.

“It takes a genius audience to make a genius performance, you know, and that’s about as close to a genius audience as you’ll get,” he says. 

This year will see an avalanche of Friedman projects, including three books: 

“Everything’s Bigger in Texas: The Life and Times of Kinky Friedman,” a 450-page — that’s not a typo — biography by music writer Mary Lou Sullivan (author of “Raisin’ Cain: The Wild and Raucous Story of Johnny Winter”); 

“The Boys From the North Country: My Life With Robert Zimmerman and Bob Dylan,” by Dylan’s boyhood friend Louie Kemp and ghostwriter Friedman. This will include a story about a Passover seder in Los Angeles at which the rabbi persuades Dylan to play “Blowing in the Wind” and Marlon Brando, of all people, to read from the Hagaddah; 

And “The Tin Can Telephone,” a mystery novel starring a private eye named Kinky Friedman that will take its place among more than 20 others in his bibliography. 

Other Friedman books — dare they be called nonfiction? —  include “Kinky Friedman’s Guide to Texas Etiquette: Or How to Get to Heaven or Hell Without Going Through Dallas-Fort Worth”;  “ ’Scuse Me While I Whip This Out: Reflections on Country Singers, Presidents and Other Troublemakers”; and “You Can Lead a Politician to Water, but You Can’t Make Him Think.”

A new CD also is planned that will include new songs he’ll play at Joe’s Cafe with sideman Joe Cirotti and his CD producer, Brian Molnar. Friedman is very partial to one of the new tunes: “Jesus in Pajamas.” 

“I just have a mild obsession with Jesus,” he says. “I think he was a good Jewish boy who got into a little trouble with the government. And he did ride in on a jackass, and everybody mocked him. They didn’t know he was gonna be such a big player. The Sisters of the Poor in Scranton, Pa., have already contacted me about using that song.”

The record will follow his 2015 album “The Loneliest Man I Ever Met,” which was his first album in decades but featured only three Friedman originals. He credits Nelson, again, for reigniting his creative spark.

“One night at 3 in the morning,” Friedman says, “Willie called and asked me what I was doing. I said, ‘Watching “Matlock.” ’ And Willie said, ‘That’s a sure sign of depression. Turn it off and start writing, Kinky, start writing.’ 

“So I wrote this baker’s dozen, about 13 new songs, and I kept peppering them into the shows, and they’re really going down well. So we’re gonna record those this summer.” (Kinky says Willie called him back to find out which channel “Matlock” was on.)

Friedman says Nelson has given him other advice as well, including: 

“He said, ‘Fortunately we’re not in control.’

“And he said, ‘If you fail at something long enough, you become a legend.’

“And his other piece of wisdom was, ‘If you’re gonna have sex with an animal, always make it horse. Because that way, if things don’t work out, at least you know you’ve got a ride home.’ 

“All of that has served me well.”

Friedman’s tour is titled the Resurrected Tour, and it refers to “kind of a revival of the spirit,” he says. 

Oddly, it began during Passover and continued during Easter. He is asked if anything should be read into this — is he returning from the dead? 

“I’m a deformed Jew, you know, we don’t give a damn about anything,” he says. “So starting (the tour) on the second or third night of Passover, that’s not the way I planned it, but once the schedule is set, that’s what they do. So like a mule plowing the furrow, or like Jesus riding in on a jackass, we kept with the tour.”

A critic of former President Barack Obama’s policies toward Israel, Friedman believes President Donald Trump has already been an improvement. And he hopes Trump will rise above his silver-spoon upbringing and grow into the job like Friedman’s heroes Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt, aristocrats who came to care for common people. 

“Everybody I really respect died broke in the gutter, usually. Or someone like Nelson Mandela,” Friedman says, referring to the South African revolutionary who was imprisoned for fighting apartheid and later became the country’s president.

“Mandela was listening to the song ‘Ride ’Em Jewboy’ every night, it was the last song, his sign-off song, (in prison) on Robben Island. (Got it on) smuggled tape cassettes, according to a guy in the next cell, Tokyo Sexwale.”

Friedman calls this “the highest honor I could receive in country music.”

“Rich people, they think they made it, and the ones that inherited they think they did it themselves by their wonderful behavior,” he says. “Jesus likes a guy like me — a skinny guy who travels around the countryside irritating people.”

Friedman is told that his travels around the countryside do have an effect: He is the inspiration for the annual Hanukkah Hullabaloo concerts that Brothers Lazaroff and friends started as an after-party to a Hanukkah-week show Friedman did at Off Broadway about six years ago.

“No kidding?” he asks, then starts laughing. “That’s great. You know, everybody’s gotta be remembered for something. May the Lord take a likin’ to ya.”