When she’s not busy winning awards or working on her upcoming album, Taylor Swift has been lending her talents to the soundtrack for “The Hunger Games.”

The 22-year-old country star tweeted a link to the single, titled “Safe and Sound,” on Thursday, teasing, “Something I’ve been VERY excited about for a VERY long time is going to be happening VERY soon (and I’m not referring to Christmas).”

She crafted the song with The Civil Wars, and by Friday afternoon the folk group tweeted that “Safe and Sound” was No. 1 on iTunes.

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) — Jason Aldean thinks this year’s Country Music Association Awards could be the start of something new.

Country music is slow to change, and so are the 6,000 members who vote for the winners of Wednesday night’s show. So when they nominated Jason Aldean and Blake Shelton in the entertainer of the year category for the first time it meant something.

“Every few years you kind of start to see a changeover of everything,” Aldean said. “You start to see different people getting into categories they weren’t before. It’s like the changing of the guard a little bit.”

NEW YORK – Country music legend Glen Campbell has been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, and plans to put out his final album this summer.

Campbell’s representative Bobbie Gale made the announcement Wednesday. The disease is in its early stages.

The 75-year-old’s wife Kim also talked to People magazine and said they wanted to go public with his illness because they wanted fans to know if he has trouble onstage.

NASHVILLE, Tenn. – Neil Young entered the mid-’80s under fire from his record label for making music it said it couldn’t sell and under attack from the IRS for having “too much artistic control.”

He was making a rockin’ kind of country music that didn’t resemble his greatest records and his label said didn’t appeal to radio programmers. Those things didn’t matter to Young, though. He was having the time of his life, playing 85 shows across North America in 1984 and `85 with The International Harvesters, and you can hear it on his new live album, “A Treasure.”

Country superstars Blake Shelton and Reba McEntire raised $500,000 for victims of recent tornados in Oklahoma.

PHOTOS: Stars’ good deeds

Shelton, a musician coach of NBC’s “The Voice,” teamed up with McEntire, his adviser on the competition series, for two relief concerts May 25 and 26 in Durant, Okla. Kelly Clarkson even made a surprise appearance at the May 26 relief show.
Story: Miranda Lambert shoots her own matrimonial meal

The duo — both Oklahoma natives — donated all proceeds to the Tushka Disaster Relief fund.

Marie Osmond tied the knot on Wednesday — and the groom was a very familiar face.

Osmond, 51, remarried her first husband, Stephen Craig, 54, at the Las Vegas Mormon temple on Wednesday.

VIEW THE PHOTOS: Celebrity Wedding Photos!

“I am so happy and look forward to sharing my life with Stephen, who is an amazing man as well as a great father to my children,” Osmond said in a statement to People.

LAS VEGAS — The young women of country ruled The Academy of Country Music Awards on Sunday night with Taylor Swift winning the prestigious entertainer of the year award and the night’s top nominee, Miranda Lambert, taking home a leading four trophies.

Swift covered her mouth with her hands, did a little dance and hugged Brad Paisley and Lambert on the way to the stage after winning the fan-voted award, the only major ACM award determined by popular vote; peers and industry insiders determine the other awards.

In what was the best results show in recent memory, “American Idol” had a little bit of everything Thursday night. It went from a Motown legend to a country-music duet to a wrestling icon to a surprising and dramatic finish.

There were also plenty of winners and losers along the way. Here’s a brief scorecard that tells the tale:

WINNERS
Casey Abrams: He came within seconds of not only being kicked off the show, but also denied his place on the “American Idol” summer tour. Singing first on the two-hour performance show Wednesday and styling his beard toward almost a gentleman level did not pay off, as he received the lowest number of votes.

(PEOPLE.com) — Billy Ray Cyrus is recanting the remarks that ricocheted around the world.

“I love ‘Hannah Montana.’ I love Disney. I wouldn’t change anything,” the musician and father of Miley Cyrus said on Wednesday’s “Good Morning America,” in response to a volatile interview he gave in December in which he blamed “Hannah Montana” for destroying his family.

Now, Cyrus says his messy home life was to blame, adding that he was “surrounded in darkness” when he gave the interview. At the time, Cyrus was in the midst of filing for a divorce that he has since called off.

NASHVILLE, Tenn. – Trace Adkins summed up his role in the new film “The Lincoln Lawyer” in his own succinct way when he gathered friends and media for a screening of it recently.

“I’m in it at the beginning and the end and there’s a buncha crap in the middle,” Adkins said with a smile of the movie, which opened Friday.

He’s on screen about 3 minutes, but it’s another solid step in the country singer’s second career with a handful of parts slated for later this year.