Post Malone recorded a song with lyrics from Bob Dylan, but things got 'weird'

Post Malone recorded a song with lyrics from Bob Dylan, but things got "weird," producer Michael Cash claims.

The rapper is the latest artist to have had a bizarre collaboration with the music legend. 

During the pandemic, Cash got a big idea while thinking about the Dylan-related project from the mid-2010s, Lost on the River: The New Basement Tapes, in which artists recorded songs based on newly uncovered Dylan lyrics.

Cash, whose background is mostly hip-hop, envisioned an album of Dylan songs recorded by artists like Kendrick Lamar, J. Cole, and Post Malone.

So, Cash contacted Dylan’s longtime representative, Jeff Rosen, and pitched the idea of Post Malone recording a Dylan song.

Malone has publicly stated he's a huge Dylan fan.

Last year, after watching an early pre-fame clip of himself covering Dylan, the rapper explained on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon that Dylan actually slid into his DMs.

He said he'd not met the music icon, but that they'd been chatting.

Malone said: "I don’t know how much I’m at liberty to discuss," and added: “It’s incredible… He’s always just been a voice in my head. I’ve always just appreciated the music and appreciated the songwriting.”

Cash told Rolling Stone that he sent Rosen a photo of the Dylan tattoo on Malone’s left bicep and the link to Malone’s pre-fame cover of Dylan’s Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right.

After several weeks, Rosen texted Cash at two o’clock in the morning saying Dylan would write Malone something.

Rosen added: "He’s got something in mind that he wants to craft specifically for this.”

However, a source close to the Dylan camp told Rolling Stone that Dylan already had the lyrics "lying around."

On November 18, 2020, Rosen sent the lyrics to a song called Be Not Deceived, about "a loss of innocence," and when Cash read Malone the lyrics over the phone, they brought the singer to tears. 

At Cash's barn recording studio in Woodstock, New York, an area already steeped in Dylan history, Malone got to work. 

According to Cash, Malone believed Dylan would attend the sessions, but that wasn't the case. 

Regardless, Malone laid down about 40 percent of a version of the track before the rapper had to take off.

Although the song had a beginning, a middle, and an end, it still needed "flair."

Cash claims Rosen heard the song and liked it, but then everybody left the studio and it fell through.

The producer said: "Look, all I can tell you is it went from being something to be excited about to just turning into a circular, figure-eight pattern. Nobody had an answer.”

Cash couldn't get Malone to finish the tune and, eventually, Dylan's teams grew tired of waiting. 

He recalls: “Rosen said to me at a certain point, ‘Well, we’re just going to retract the lyrics.’”

The producer continued: “Bob and Mr. Rosen do things a specific way. They get things done in a New York minute, and then it started to become … Honestly, they just were like, ‘This should be finished.’”

Malone won't reveal what happened, and neither will Cash, but he says “it just seems like nobody really managed expectations, and it just seems like nobody communicated. A really cool piece of music got made, and then it just got weird. It got really weird.”

Cash hopes Dylan and Rosen give back the right to use the lyrics, and that the song is released one day, but he's just thankful to have been a part of a brief collabortion between two great musicians.