@Russ i think your Music app's player state is stopped. play a track, or play one and pause it, and it should work. (mine is never stopped :).
to test the basic functionality leave out the last pipe part (" | xargs" …), and run the rest in Terminal.
osascript -e 'tell application "Music" to set result to "This song is " & name of current track & " by " & artist of current track & " on the " & year of current track & " album " & album of current track' | sed 's/^/"/;s/$/"/'
as noted, this works for the "original" Alexa. Since I've been having problems with Alexa Plus and TriggerCMD, I was trying the Shortcuts route.
