Remember When Bob Dylan Was Considering Becoming the Voice of Your Car’s GPS?

When Bob Dylan was first asking the world how it felt to be on your own with no direction home in 1965, he would have had no way of knowing how close he would come to voicing a car’s GPS. Who knew how short the pipeline could be from global music icon to global positioning system voiceover actor?

Videos by American Songwriter

As is often the case with Dylan, it was hard to tell if he was joking or serious when he first floated the idea in the late 2000s. But if there’s one thing we know to be true about Dylan, it’s that he tends to favor the oppositional side to the public’s expectations of him.

Bob Dylan Was (Maybe) Going To Be in Your Car’s GPS

Smartphones have made GPS so ubiquitous that it can be easy to forget that in the early to late 2000s, this was still relatively novel technology. Not every cell phone had a reliable GPS app, and separate or in-car navigation devices were all the rage. Notable celebrities (and sometimes, cartoon characters) voiced some of these systems, telling you to take a left turn in 900 feet in their distinct voices and accents. In 2009, Bob Dylan mused that he might throw his hat in the ring during an episode of the BBC’s Theme Time Radio Hour.

Of all the voices in pop culture history, Dylan’s is perhaps one of the most divisive, making this idea—even if it was a joke—all the more surprising. “I am talking to a couple of car companies about being the voice of their GPS system,” Dylan said during his radio show. “I think it would be good if you are looking for directions and hear my voice saying something like, ‘Left at the next street. No, a right. You know what? Just go straight.’ I probably shouldn’t do it because whichever way I go, I always end up at one place, on Lonely Avenue.”

More likely than not, Dylan was using the bit about becoming a navigational system voice actor as a quippy segue into Ray Charles’ 1956 track, “Lonely Avenue,” which the songwriter included in Episode 9 of the third season of Theme Time. The episode, titled “Street Map,” also included Roger Miller’s “King of the Road,” Hank Williams’ “Lost Highway,” and Woody Guthrie’s “Going Down the Road Feeling Bad.”

If He Did, He’d Join an Interesting Ragtag Crew

As out of left field and hilariously unexpected as Bob Dylan becoming a sat-nav voice would be, years of no such updates would suggest that he was only making a clever joke for the sake of a good radio segue. (Which it obviously was, since the story lives on today.) But if he had been serious about becoming the voice of your car’s GPS, he would have joined quite the ragtag bunch of actors, celebrities, and cartoon characters who have added their voice to apps like Waze.

Waze features a long list of star-studded voice packs, including Boy George, Neil Patrick Harris, T-Pain, C-3PO, Kevin Hart, Jeff Dunham’s puppets, Stephen Colbert, and Arnold Schwarzenegger, to name a few. And who knows—maybe it’s wise of Dylan to wait until his later years to become a navigational assistant, that way his voice is as sandpapery and leathery as humanly possible.

Photo by Evening Standard/Hulton Archive/Getty Images