Bob Dylan's latest side project isn't new music—it's a $5-a-month Patreon packed with ghostly letters and cowboy fiction that has fans scratching their heads. Over the weekend, his official Instagram and Twitter quietly pointed followers to "a living archive of lectures from the grave, letters never sent, and original short stories curated by Bob Dylan," reports Rolling Stone. The debut batch includes a mock correspondence between Mark Twain and silent film star Rudolph Valentino, ostensibly written from beyond the grave by a "Herbert Foster," plus a seven-page short story, Bull Rider, credited to "Marty Lombard." It reads, in part:
- "The bus coughed me out somewhere past Amarillo, dust in my teeth and a sky that stretched out so wide it felt like it was laughing at me. I had a duffel bag, two shirts, a paperback of The Sea Wolf with the spine cracked like an old man's knuckles, and the kind of hunger you don't fix with food."
There are also long audio pieces with titles like "Last Testament of Frank James" and "Aaron Burr: On the Art of Survival," which listeners say sound AI-generated, even though as Pitchfork notes, "yes, this is the Nobel Prize-winning writer we're talking about here." What "curated by Bob Dylan" actually means remains unclear—whether he's writing, editing, or simply lending his name isn't specified, and the project isn't even linked to from his official website. The odd pivot has some fans wondering why they're getting faux-historical ephemera instead of concert recordings or studio outtakes. Meanwhile, Dylan is six shows into a US tour built largely around 2020's Rough and Rowdy Ways, with a few rarities sprinkled into a setlist that otherwise stays firmly in his post-1966 era.
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