It’s well after midnight somewhere off the coast of Florida, and Mojo Nixon is leading a cruise ship full of lubricated and rowdy country-music fans in a bawdy singalong of a song titled “Tie My Pecker to My Leg.”

We won’t get into the lyrics here, but the verses touch on everything from barnyard sex to fornicating at a county fair. “This guy just heard the song for the first time,” Nixon, 65, and dressed in his customary Hawaiian shirt and uneven denim cutoffs, says, pointing to a man in the front row. “He’s grinning ear to ear!”

If there’s a safe space for Nixon and his unfiltered brand of worldly-redneck commentary and rambunctious cowpunk songs, it’s probably in international waters, free from any laws that may impede his ability to spout off. “It’s a real divider. If you can’t handle ‘Tie My Pecker to My Leg,’ you’re not gonna like the rest of the show,” Nixon says a few weeks later, back on dry land at his home in Cincinnati. “But if I don’t run a few people off, I haven’t done my job.”

Nixon, a shouting singer, button-pushing songwriter, unrepentant shit-stirrer and, since 2004, on-air personality for Sirius XM’s Outlaw Country channel — which is what finds him aboard the 2023 Outlaw Country Cruise — has been making a career out of both entertaining and appalling audiences since the early 1980s. That’s when he and washboard whiz Skid Roper formed a duo and began releasing songs like “Jesus at McDonald’s,” “Stuffin’ Martha’s Muffin,” and “Burn Down the Malls.”