You could go about this in many ways -- I would suggest implementing a singleton to handle the media playback. Rather than constantly retaining that view, this singleton manager (part of your model) should provide any controllers with the needed information about the current song, album, author, etc.
Ex. In your TableViewController:
- (void)viewDidLoad
{
[self setSong:[[PlaybackManager sharedInstance] currentSong]];
if (self.song) {
//Add navigation item
}
}