Bob Dylan has been mocked by fans who joked about his Patreon page being the basis for another album.
Dylan has not released a studio album since 2020’s Rough and Rowdy Ways, and though he is currently on tour in North America, fans are still hoping for new material. The 84-year-old songwriter has, technically, granted fans their wish, releasing a series of fictionalised letters and history podcasts on a Patreon page. The announcement of Dylan’s Patreon page was mocked at the time, and fans questioned whether the writing featured on the site was artificially generated. Allegations of AI usage from Dylan dominated a forum discussion, with fans joking that, should Dylan write a new album, they want it to feature his Civil War-themed Patreon stories.
A fan asked: “If Bob Dylan released a new album of originals this week and declared it his final work, what would you want it to sound like? What overarching themes would you want him to tackle? Would you want another reflective mortality piece like Rough And Rowdy Ways, or would you want him to go out with a fun bang? Maybe a final political statement, even though that wouldn’t be such a great send off, in my opinion. What are your thoughts?”
The top reply to the question reads: “I’d like it to be a bunch of AI monologues about Civil War history.” Another joked: “Maybe he’ll go the Arctic Monkeys path and make a whole cyberpunk concept album, just because the lead singer finally found out how to use the internet.” A third joked that they wanted “hypothetical letters between dead celebrities or historical figures,” as the context of the last album.
The “hypothetical letters” comment comes after Dylan launched a Patreon page of fictionalised letters between the dead. One post to his Patreon page features a “letter never sent” from Miles Davis to Robert Kennedy. Another letter posted to the page is from Humphrey Bogart to Elvis Presley.
A more serious response reads: “All jokes aside, Rough and Rowdy Ways is such a perfect farewell album that I’ll always see it as his send-off no matter what else he releases. It encapsulates his creative process, his contradictions, the multitudes he contains, his stubbornness and sentimentality, and his place in American history so well that I don’t know where else there is to go.
“As far as I’m concerned, the pressure for a perfect goodbye is off of him, and now I just want to hear whatever happens to inspire him. That was the goodbye, and anything else is just the epilogue.”
Another listener agreed, adding: “Yeah, part of me doesn’t want him to put out another album of originals just because Rough and Rowdy Ways is a banger of a note to end on, I have a hard time seeing him topping it. I’d be quite content if he put out more Shadow Kingdom-style reworkings of old material, or covers projects.”
