Harry Shearer’s Spinal Tap Character Announces Solo Album Featuring A Ton Of Classic Rock Guys
Harry Shearer — longtime Simpsons voice actor and co-creator of This Is Spinal Tap — is releasing a solo album as the character that he portrayed in the 1984 mockumentary film. “Derek Smalls”‘s first album is called Smalls Change (Meditations Upon Ageing) and it features a lot of real-life classic rock guys as contributors. As Rolling Stone reports, David Crosby, Donald Fagen, Peter Frampton, Taylor Hawkins, Chad Smith, Rick Wakeman, Dweezil Zappa, Joe Satriana, and Steve Vai will appear on the album. The fictional Smalls described the album as “halfway between ‘rage against the dying light’ and trying to find the light.”
Shearer has released a number of solo albums as himself over the years, most recently 2010’s Greed And Fear. And the fictional Spinal Tap have gotten together for a few releases, the last of which was 2009’s Back From The Dead.
Rolling Stone has short humorous descriptions of each of the tracks on the new Smalls solo LP — check those out here.
Smalls Change (Meditations Upon Ageing) is out 4/13 via Twanky Records/BMG.