A couple of years back, the august music writer David Hepworth came up with a great line about Bob Dylan. Dylan, he averred, “is like China: we can see what he’s doing, but never quite work out why he’s doing it”. That’s certainly true about the unexpected launch of the 84-year-old singer-songwriter’s Patreon. Everything about it is confusing.

For one, there’s the choice of platform. Plenty of major music stars have flocked to the newsletter provider Substack in recent years to share their thoughts or show their workings and, perhaps, earn a little cash on the side: everyone from Patti Smith and Dolly Parton to Charli xcx and Rosalía. But Patreon, where fans pay monthly subscriptions for exclusive content from all sorts of creators – podcasters, visual artists – has never really taken off with big rock and pop musicians: the biggest name it could boast, until now, was Ben Folds.

Then there’s the fact that no one seems entirely certain if the posts that have thus far appeared on Lectures from the Grave – billed as “a living archive of lectures from the grave, letters never sent, and original short stories” – are by Dylan or not. The writing and lectures posted so far on Patreon come without attribution or under pseudonymous names. The description of its contents suggests only that your $5 (£4) a month will get you content “curated by Bob Dylan”, which isn’t the same thing as authorship. The means by which the Patreon was announced – a couple of teaser videos and a flyer posted to Dylan’s Instagram, with no mention of it on his official website – and the fact that the lectures appear to have been voiced using AI have been cause for some consternation among fans, if you take the comments under the Instagram posts at face value. (The Guardian has contacted representatives for Dylan.)

What he’s posted up to this point does seem very Dylan-ish, or at least in the realm of his interests. The first post was a context-free video of gospel singer Mahalia Jackson, somewhat in the vein of Dylan’s Instagram, where context-free clips of everyone from James Cagney to Jerry Lee Lewis abound. Dylan famously performed alongside Jackson at the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. (When the day’s big event got under way – Martin Luther King’s legendary I Have a Dream speech – Dylan’s friend Wavy Gravy apparently leaned over to the singer and said “I hope he’s over quick, Mahalia Jackson’s on next.”) There’s a lecture about Wild Bill Hickok, a folk hero of the Old West who – if the late Sam Shepard’s “dramatised” 1987 interview True Dylan is to be believed – has haunted Dylan since childhood. “I used to dream about things like Ava Gardner and Wild Bill Hickok,” Dylan apparently told Shepard when asked about his childhood. “They were playin’ cards, chasin’ each other and getting’ around.” Certainly, Hickcok haunted Dylan’s early oeuvre: the central character in 1962’s Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Willie is based on him.

There’s a fictional letter sent by Mark Twain to Rudolph Valentino: if you’re after purported examples of Twain’s influence on Dylan’s writing, online Dylanologists can provide you with dozens, while Valentino cropped up both in the lyrics of Farewell, Angelina – “little elves” are dancing “Valentino-type tangos” – and in an oft-quoted line from an interview where Dylan listed him alongside TS Eliot, Robert Frost and Lyndon B Johnson as examples of people he thought were “poets”.

And if you want a particularly tenuous link between something posted on the Patreon and Dylan’s past, then you might consider that Thomas Jefferson’s vice-president Aaron Burr – the subject of another lecture – was reputed to have kept a livery stable in the building that subsequently housed the Cafe Bizarre, one of the Greenwich Village folk clubs where Dylan tried his luck in the early 60s – to no avail, as he protested in his autobiography Chronicles: “The patrons were mostly working men who sat around laughing, cussing, eating red meat, talking pussy … talent scouts didn’t come to those dens.” (The Cafe Bizarre’s reputation for uncovering new talent took a further battering in the mid-60s, when the owner fired a band who had a residency there, called the Velvet Underground).

Of course, tenuous links are meat and drink to Dylan: the man himself has seldom offered much in the way of explication, creating a void into which Dylanologists have rushed. One suspects they’re going to have a high old time decoding whatever he chooses to upload to his Patreon: if a man who sold his publishing to Universal for a reported $300m back in 2020 patently doesn’t need the $5 a month subscription fee – although, one might argue, why shouldn’t he be paid for his work? – his fans are doubtless going to view it as money exceptionally well spent. And if the whole business seems a little puzzling, there’s decades of evidence to suggest that simply makes it very on brand.