This summer, Bret Michaels, and stadiums worth of fans, are going to have ‘nothin’ but a good time’ at Parti-Gras, a celebration of music, fans, and bands featuring Night Ranger, Jefferson Starship, Steve Augeri (former lead singer of Journey) and Mark McGrath of Sugar Ray, but fans don’t have to wait till summer to rock out to Bret’s greatest hits as tomorrow, Wednesday, January 18th, Bret Michaels will release his brand new song, “Back In The Day,” a feel-good, throwback, road trip anthem, along with an MTV-style pop-up music video with never-before-seen footage. The nostalgia is like a love letter to longtime fans and in time for Valentine’s Day.

I caught up with Bret to talk about his upcoming tour, new song, and music video and got the behind-the-scenes details. Whether you are a Poison fan from ‘back in the day’ or a newer generation Bret fan, this interview has all the info you crave.

The “Back In The Day” single and music video premieres on Bret’s official YouTube channel Wednesday, January 18 at 1:00 PM ET / 10:00 AM PT and will be followed by an hour-long Facebook Live Q & A on Bret’s official Facebook page at 9:00 PM ET / 6:00 PM PT.

For Parti-Gras tickets, go to Live Nation and for V.I.P. Parti-Gras meet & greet tickets (sold separately), head over to BretMichaels.com.

KG: You're going to be heading out on a Parti-Gras tour this summer. I love the name by the way.

BM: First of all, thank you. It's the Parti-Gras Mardi Gras. From the moment the fans enter there's bandanas, there's beads; we let fans know immediately, this is a party. You're coming to have a great time. The slogan for Parti-Gras is, “All Killer, No Filler,” meaning all killer hits, no filler. I have DJs spinning on stage between the bands. There's no downtime, it's not like we're going to be down for a half hour while they quietly change out the set; it's a party from the minute you enter till ya leave. All the bands get to share almost the whole entire stage and at the end of the night they all roll up and eventually sing with me. And we exchange hits like a mash up, so I'll come out singing three or four Poison or Bret Michaels songs, and I'll go “I want to do one of my favorite Journey songs, but why don’t we have the real singers do it…” then you got Steve Augeri from Journey singing Journey songs and then I go up and play guitar or the congas.

KG: So you'll be assisting on instrumentals while they sing?

BM: Yes, that's what all of us are doing. The Parti-Gras tour has many dates, but only the 12 Live Nation music festivals will be that exact lineup. So, there's many different lineups, some of them will be part country, some of them will have different bands, it will have different feels of rock, every night I have a mystery guest.

KG: So, every night there’s going to be a surprise guest that was unannounced?

BM: Hopefully flavored from the city.

KG: I heard there's also going to be a “Dress Like Bret” karaoke contest where the winner will come up on stage with you at the end of the show?

BM: 1,000% true and what we're doing is when people get into the building, they are thrown a mic, they’ll have 15 or 30 seconds to sing “Nothin’ But A Good Time” and then whatever the local DJs vote, that's who gets to come up. And we're not messing around, we're handing you the mic, so you either need to be really good, or really awful. One of the two, be extremely great, which is what I prefer, but if you're horrible, but it's worth it, we're gonna give you like one line of the song to bust it out. When we're on the road and we go to some of those karaoke bars, there's people that are so talented singing Poison, or AC/DC, or Beyonce, and they’re nailing it. So we're gonna give some of our fans a chance to come up and sing with all of us, they’ll be up there with all the bands at the end of the night.

KG: I was wondering if they have to be able to sing well or just look like you?

BM: The truth is, yes, we are looking for 1,000% singing well, so we're looking for the best of the best, but if they're really awful, but a character, that may also win.

KG: I can't wait to see pictures of this and see two Brets up there on stage.

BM: It's gonna be great. And it can be any version of Bret: Baby Bret, Outdoor Bret, Biker Bret, it can be Rockin’ Bret; whatever version they pick.

KG: I've seen pictures where people dress their pets like Bret too; those are great with the bandanas and everything.

BM: It is incredible how much people get into having fun with it, and that's one of the things we're doing with Live Nation. They got so excited about the “Dress Your Pet Like Bret” contest; that's where this kind of got born from.

KG: I heard there's going to be a Tiki hut golf cart driving through the parking lot during prime tailgating time throwing beads and maybe chances to win backstage passes and stuff.

BM: Absolutely. We call it “the bucket.” I've had the golf cart for years, but I finally took some of my upbringing mechanical skills and attached a really cool Tiki hut top on it. So, most of it's just going through and handing people bandanas, beads, but we throw people that are parting, having a tailgate party, a Nerf basketball, they have to throw it while the cart is moving and if they sink it, then they get drink tickets, backstage passes. If there's a whole party of people they gotta give the best person there a chance while the cart is moving; they get one shot to make a swish.

KG: And hopefully they're not too drunk that they can make it.

BM: Exactly, or sometimes it takes the edge off as my dad used to say.

KG: So, you built the grass roof to the Tiki golf cart yourself, now was there no budget, or you just like to be hands on as I know you do?

BM: No, I’m very hands on. I went and found those thatched roofs they make, like a top of an umbrella, and then I worked hard to make it fit on the golf cart and not blow away, you don’t want it in the next parking lot, so with a little ingenuity, we got it done and put the Nerf basket hoop on it, so it's going to be awesome.

KG: I know you like to be hands on because I'll never forget a few years ago, your team posted on social media that you were playing an outdoor concert and beforehand you were cutting the grass with a ride on mower and I was like, that is so Bret, he loves his ride on toys, being outside, and your motto is “have fun and get done.”

BM: Thank you for noticing; I love you for noticing that. You got to tell the fans that if they want to laugh, if they're ever having a bad day, or good day, just laugh at my Bret Michaels official TikTok. I’m under my RV, during the stadium tour, working on it. I'm sitting there, sweating, literally taking two-by-fours to keep the structure underneath where we store stuff in the RV—this thing is collapsing—I'm like I need to get under there or this is going to be a bad scene on the road somewhere, and I literally cut the boards, drilled it, put it up in there and all of a sudden Pete was laughing, and I go, “Where's that noise coming from?” Pete, in my solo band, he goes, “Bret, this is the best thing ever!” I'm under there like, “Why don't you get your ass in here and do this?”

KG: Well, it makes me feel better when I have to mow my own lawn; I'm like, Brett mows his.

BM: Yes, I got the old zero turnout. I saw the crew taking a break… and you know why I did that? We were playing this incredible show, it was a big rock festival, and the grass was just really high, and I'm thinking, there's going to be literally eight to 10,000 people standing in this tonight. The crew was doing great, and it wasn't anyone's fault, they were just taking a lunch break, and I knew it wasn't long before the gates opened. We're doing soundcheck, and they were setting up, I jumped on that zero turn and I was like, “I'm gonna knock this out,” and I got that grass cut, and trust me, those fans were grateful; they didn’t have knee-high grass to stand in.

KG: You're a full-service rock star; you do it all!

BM: That’s it. Right there's your headline, “Full Service Rock Star.”

KG: You have some new music coming out too, a single called “Back In The Day.” I hear it's a feel-good, throwback, road trip anthem. Tell me about the song.

BM: I'm really excited, because I write music every day. I'm always writing, recording stuff. When we get a chance just to sit one time, I will play you stuff that I mouth into my phone, I'm like, “Oh my god, I got this idea” and I’m like, “doo doo doo doo, boom ah boom boom;” I start mouthing the ideas so I don't forget it, and that's how “Back In The Day” came around. I wanted to write this song that just celebrated music, the DJs that played the music, that spun it, and it was a celebration of that summer feel, and I just wanted to write a feel-good road trip anthem. The concept of the video is a true throwback to the early MTV days with the green screen, that for some reason has become really hip again amongst my daughters, you know 17 and 21-year-olds, and their friends; they love early MTV videos. We went back to the pop-up video days. There's pop-up imaging throughout the whole video. I shot this with green screen and never-before-seen footage of me as a kid playing guitar, and just images they have not seen of me growing up. So, the song is just a really a good rock song with a good story.

KG: MTV was the best wasn't it? What a great time in music history.

BM: Oh my god, for me… you have to understand; I was glued. I would just wait for the next video. I love all styles of music, but it was great when you get to see an early rock video on there, and Headbangers Ball, but it was also great when they were mixing up Run-D.M.C. and Aerosmith.

KG: So, the video is going to have never-seen-before photos and videos from ‘back in the day,’ kind of like your book, “Auto-Scrap-Ography.”

BM: It's exactly what it is. I took a lot of what “Auto-Scrap-Ography” is and put it into “Back In The Day.” The video, the song, the ideology behind it, just letting people know, here's where I came from, a basement with a sump pump that never dumped the water out, in a small town, and I say, you can take those things, and no matter where that dream takes you, you can do it. I always found that the journey is the pot of gold. I like the highs and lows of the journey and the challenge it brings me. I know I'm a little different than most people, but I like to jump in the car and see where the road takes me.

KG: Looking back, what is most nostalgic for you, whether it's a time in your career, or just the music scene in general?

BM: The most nostalgic for me was that magic period from about 15 to 17 years old and that period of really actually playing my first bars, first real guitars. You see images of me in this video, I'm literally building our stage to play the spring fling. They had no stage and it was a water-soaked field. We would literally engineer stages or our drums would have been in mud. So that's what we did. Whatever it took. We just got it done.

KG: You have said that the hardest song to write is a party song as in the middle of partying you don't want to stop and sit down and write a song.

BM: Exactly. The here's the difference, “Back In The Day” is a reflection song and it's got this immediate groove, early punk sound at the beginning, and then it rocks, and then just explodes into a chorus. Lyrically, reflective songs and ballads are easier to write because you're focused, but the music on this is up tempo, but when you're writing a straight up party song, those are tough because you are in the middle of having a good time and you really don’t want to sit down and reflect.

KG: So being more of a reflective song, it wasn't as hard as writing, “Nothin’ But A Good Time.”

BM: Yes. “Nothin’ But A Good Time,” I wrote that reflective. I worked as a busboy and a fry cook for years to make ends meet. “Nothin’ But A Good Time,” in a strange way is reflective because it's talking about just being put down, told you're never going to make it. That is literally how people spoke to you. They're like, “Yeah, there's no band that's ever made it from here; your chances are like negative zero,” and the more they said, “No,” the harder I fought.

KG: I just saw an old interview you did where you talked about how the name Poison came about, how you were in the Bible Belt and people said you were poisoning the youth of America, and so you took that negative and turned it into a positive and named your band “Poison.”

BM: Yes, absolutely right. When we were doing that, I even went out and spoke to people that were yelling at me, I'm like, I'm not running from this. I went out and said, “Look, I understand your concern, but this music is fun, it relates to life;" it wasn't what they thought it was. But that sort of happened with me at a couple of those concerts we were doing and they were picketing. I would literally walk out, get yelled at for a little bit, and I'd say, “Hold on, this isn't what you think it is,” and eventually, 99 out of 100 really understood it.

KG: Will this new song be sung at Parti-Gras, or just the old favorites?

BM: This is one of the new songs I would love to do, and then it's all going to be nothing but hits. Every band on here has so many top 10, or top 20 singles, that we're just going to interchange some of them each night so it doesn't look like a pre-programmed show.

KG: You put out some teasers of some of your lyrics of your new song on Tik Tok. Are you able to share a line of the chorus?

BM: Yeah, so here is the chorus, “Back in the day, radio played our favorite songs, the DJ’d say ‘crank it up’ and we’d start to sing.” The melody just came to me over top of these chords, like there was no rhyme or reason. I remember us in the car vividly, me and my buddies, our girlfriends going down to the shore down to Wildwood, and all of us just singing. All we had was cassette, or the radio, and the radio was cranking and each station would fade out and then we’d pull up a station in Philly and listen to that and just singing songs at the top of our lungs.

The single is meant to be a feel-good, road trip anthem, and it has me singing while I’m driving in the old Javelin car. It's also a tip of the hat to radio, that for bands like me, they were the gatekeepers, they played our song even when we were starting out as an independent band. KNAC, and stations like that, played “Cat Dragged In” and “Talk Dirty To Me” and we would have never got that extra bump. I'm giving a tip of the hat to radio that also saw the light in songs like “Every Rose Has Its Thorn” that no one knew what to do with; they were like, “Is it a country song, is it Americana, is it rock? What do we do with this?” and all of a sudden, it was in Dallas at the Eagle, the rock station and the country station broke the song and it was a song that broke down a lot of barriers and people related to the bitter sweetness of life.

KG: Are you going to have other new music coming out or just the single for now?

BM: We also got “Parti-Gras,” that's coming out and then I'm working on, the tentative title is called “Until Then,” and it's a beautiful brand-new ballad.

KG: I also heard you mentioned a song called, “You, The Beach, and Me.”

BM: Yep, that one is done. It'll be released in the summer and I can’t wait for fans to hear that. Me and Jimmy Buffett have done “Margaritaville” together and I always encourage fans to go look that up on YouTube of us live in Detroit, and so this combination of “You, The Beach, and Me” is kind of like Bret Michaels meets Kenny Chesney meets Jimmy Buffett.

KG: Is there anything else you'd like to say to your fans?

BM: Just to say I am forever grateful. Just thank you for all the great years and more to come.