Love Song by Rainer Maria Rilke

How can I keep my soul in me, so that
it doesn't touch your soul? How can I raise
it high enough, past you, to other things?
I would like to shelter it, among remote
lost objects, in some dark and silent place
that doesn't resonate when your depths resound.
Yet everything that touches us, me and you,
takes us together like a violin's bow,
which draws *one* voice out of two separate strings.
Upon what instrument are we two spanned?
And what musician holds us in his hand?
Oh sweetest song.



*Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke (1875 - 1926), circa 1920. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images) @ PicApp

Spinal Tap Is Back From the Dead

Some time ago, watching TV, I saw the trio, “Derek Smalls,” “David St. Hubbins,” and “Nigel Tufnel,” who together compose Spinal Tap – not as the rock band in spandex that they are, but as themselves in real life, Harry Shearer, Christopher Guest, and Michael McKean, respectively, looking old and gray in laidback shirts, carrying their acoustic guitars, singing Spinal Tap songs unplugged and country-style. They were insistent, in an interview, that while there is some clamor for their return as the now Legendary Losers of Rock, it isn’t going to happen, though of course they’ll see.

And they did see, and so shall we, on June 16, when Back from the Dead, a new album from Spinal Tap is scheduled for release, and on June 30, when they are scheduled to perform in the Wembley Arena of London.

It’s hard to imagine how I would personally receive this album beyond the music. After all, the movie This is Spinal Tap was a remarkably precise mockumentary / rockumentary of an ageing British rock group touring in America.

We enjoyed the music in 1984, but more importantly, we laughed our heads off. Why the hell not? The music, the staging, the backstage bantering, the debauchery, and the philosophizing are on target, as if you’re watching either some hugely popular rock group or some serious documentary about rock. The film irreverently poked fun on the demigods of rock, with oblique references to Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, Jimi Hendix, Judas Priest, Deep Purple, to name a few – and, my oh my, how we enjoyed laughing at all of them.

In important ways we are freed from them, from the hold they think they have on us rock fans, and, more importantly, the hold that we don’t know they have on us. Watching This is Spinal Tap we are finally able to separate the music from the faces, the craft from the oddities, if not stupidities.

Now, 25 years later, Spinal Tap is back. The get-up of the guys has changed since I last saw them on TV; or, has not changed, if you look at the old movie poster – it all depends on where you’re coming from or from what era. Looking at a recent photo, the hook, the laugh seems to be still there. The eponymous title track also sounds groovy. But gone are the days of glam rock and spandex. So who will be the joke on?

If anything, the idea will only be a kind of nostalgic revisiting, and the first buyers will be the oldies. Spinal Tap, in 1984, were already growing old and growing to be nobodies; the rest of them are gone past growing old now. Let’s see how the young ‘uns will buy it.

*Spinal Tap Dolls photo by Dmason @ Flickr

Checkout the writeup and song stream on Billboard:
Exclusive: Spinal Tap Debuts Song, Comes 'Back From The Dead' For Album