“‘Lost Americana,’” the familiar voice intones, “is a personal excavation of the American dream.” So begins a few sentences’ narration over a trailer released online Tuesday for an upcoming album by the artist MGK, formerly known as Machine Gun Kelly.
And darned if the narrator does not sound exactly like Bob Dylan.
It seems that Dylan, 84, the Nobel laureate and firmly canonized member of the American musical scene, has lent his voice to promoting the pop-punk musician’s first LP since “Mainstream Sellout” in 2022.
Neither artist has publicly offered confirmation. A representative for MGK did not reply to a request for comment. A representative for Dylan said the artist is on tour and was not available.
The trailer features grainy, home video-style footage of MGK — an insouciant onetime rapper who has since branched out to country, pop and pop-punk — pursuing such analog activities as riding a motorcycle, smoking cigarettes and hanging out with friends. The voice advertises the album, due in August, as “a love letter to those who seek to rediscover: the dreamers, the drifters, the defiant.”
So what would bring together a tattooed musician, actor and model known for making tabloid headlines for his onetime relationship with the actress Megan Fox and … Bob Dylan?
Dylan and his music have been known to pop up in surprising places — like ads for the Bank of Montreal, IBM, Chrysler, Cadillac, Victoria’s Secret and Pepsi. (Though he often doesn’t show up where you might expect — like the Nobel Prize ceremony where he was being honored, or an episode of “Saturday Night Live” on which the actor Timothée Chalamet performed his music.)
Dylan and MGK have demonstrated an affinity for each other. MGK’s latest single, the jittery genre mash-up “Cliché,” features the lyric “Baby, I’m a rolling stone” — arguably a reference to the title of Dylan’s most famous song.
In February, Dylan posted a video of MGK performing the rap track “Almost” on his Instagram. MGK’s response: “you having a phone is so rad,” he commented. (“Times they are a changing yo,” added another commenter.)
The trailer’s director, Sam Cahill, posted it on his own Instagram account Tuesday with a caption that MGK echoed in his own feed: “Trailer narrated by …” (Cahill did not reply to a request for comment).
The narration describes MGK’s new work but sounds exactly how a Dylan fan — or Dylan himself — might describe Dylan’s output: “a sonic map of forgotten places, a tribute to the spirit of reinvention and a quest to reclaim the authentic essence of American freedom.”
The narrator adds, “From the gold neon diners to the rumble of the motorcycles, this is music that celebrates the beauty found in the in-between spaces where the past is reimagined and the future is forged on your own terms.”
Or maybe that is just a coincidence. As someone once said, “Well, we all like motorcycles to some degree.”
