Sylvester Stallone dropped the news himself, on Instagram, sounding like a man who still can't quite believe his luck. Bill Conti, the composer who gave Rocky its theme and its heartbeat, is coming back to work with him. Fifty years on.

Conti will record original music for the audiobook version of The Steps, Stallone's memoir due out September 29. "I just got some fantastic news," Stallone said in the video, before calling Conti a genius twice in the space of a minute. Fair enough, given what that score did for a low-budget boxing picture in 1976.

The book itself covers ground Stallone has talked about before but rarely at this length. It runs from his arrival in New York in 1969 to the night Rocky won Best Picture at the 1977 Oscars, and along the way it gets into a rough birth, a rougher childhood, and years of being the guy nobody in Hollywood wanted to bet on. The framing is deliberate. Stallone has built a career, and now a memoir, around the idea that the steps up the Philadelphia Art Museum mean something bigger than a movie scene.

What's notable is the format play. Plenty of actors do audiobook narration themselves and call it a day. Stallone is going further, folding in an original score from the same composer who scored the film that made him. It's a small thing on paper, but it changes what the audiobook is. Less a reading, more a companion piece to Rocky itself.

The timing isn't an accident either. Peter Farrelly's I Love Rocky, a biopic about the making of the first film, just premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival. Early reactions, including from critics who went in skeptical, have been warmer than expected. So Stallone's own account of that period lands right as a dramatized version of it is doing the festival rounds, which is either smart sequencing or just how the timelines happened to fall.

No word yet on how long Conti's contribution runs, or whether any of it will surface separately from the audiobook. Stallone's publishers haven't detailed the audio release beyond the September 29 date shared for the book itself. For now, the only confirmation is Stallone's own video and the promise that Conti is back in the room.

Whether the audiobook gets its own release date announcement, or simply drops alongside the print edition, should become clear closer to the end of the month.