A Post Malone-Bob Dylan collaboration was once in the works but got shelved by Dylan’s team.
Music producer Michael Cash lifted the lid on the would-be song in a new interview with Rolling Stone, explaining he thought up the idea and reached out to Dylan’s longtime representative Jeff Rosen.
After Rosen gave the project the green light, he sent over lyrics for track “Be Not Deceived” written by 82-year-old Bob Dylan.
Malone, a huge fan of the iconic singer-songwriter, was “literally in tears,” remembered Cash.
“It was talking about a loss of innocence,” the producer said of the song. “And what people are going through — disfranchised, kind of leaderless masses of children with no parent or guardian or shepherd or anything. It talked about going out and making your own way. And when you read it, honestly, it’s poetry. It’s beautiful.”
After work got underway to record the song, it stalled half way through when Malone, 28, had to take off, and then never committed to returning to the project.
“(Rosen) heard the song,” Cash said. “He liked it, and then everybody left the studio and it just got… 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.
“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.”
Because of the unexplained hold up, Dylan’s camp eventually retracted the lyrics. But Cash remains hopeful that one day the project will get finished and see the light of day.
“My hopes are that Mr. Dylan and Mr. Rosen give back the right to use the lyrics,” he sighed. “So maybe it got weird, but this is two really important musicians that I feel put the work in and it needs to be shared.”