Bob Dylan Launched a Patreon for Some Reason

The person you’ve all been waiting to see on Patreon has finally joined: Bob Dylan. This afternoon, the singer-songwriter posted an Instagram story with a flyer promoting Lectures From the Grave, an exclusive series on his new Patreon page, along with a link to the account. It costs $5 a month to view Dylan’s posts, several of which appear to utilize AI — even though, yes, this is the Nobel Prize-winning writer we’re talking about here. Pitchfork has reached out to his representative for comment.

So far there are only six posts on Dylan’s Patreon. The first is an embed of a Mahalia Jackson live performance. It’s followed by three posts with audio essays about former Vice President Aaron Burr, 19th century outlaw Frank James, and American Old West folk hero Wild Bill. Those clips, which range from 15 minutes to 67 minutes in runtime, appear to be read out loud by an AI voice. Dylan previewed two of those audio essays on Instagram over the previous months.

There’s also a series called Letters Never Sent, although there’s only one entry at the moment on his Patreon. It’s a fictional letter from Mark Twain to Rudolph Valentino, an Italian actor during the era of silent cinema. Valentino was 14 years old when Twain died in 1910. The letter ends with Twain’s cursive signature, and the whole post is attributed to the pen name Herbert Foster.

Meanwhile, another post is titled “Bull Rider (short story)” and lists Marty Lombard as the author. It’s roughly seven pages long, albeit in a larger font, and tells the story of a man who seeks out a Texan rodeo to try bull riding. It has a lot of similes. Did Dylan write it himself? Who’s to say! Read this opening paragraph from the piece to decide for yourself:

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.

Dylan seems like the type of well-read recipient of a Nobel Prize in Literature that knows you italicize the name of a book or novel, such as Jack London’s The Sea Wolf. He’s also 84. It’s worth noting that Dylan’s official website makes no mention of the Patreon account in its news section or elsewhere on the site, but it does list his upcoming tour.

Read about Dylan in The 66 Most Anticipated Tours of Spring 2026.