(CNN) — Ringo Starr walks into the hotel suite at the Beverly Hills Hotel carrying a brown paper bag.

It’s his sack lunch, and he’s packed it himself. He’s also driven himself to the hotel and arrived alone — no entourage, no bodyguard, no assistant, no fuss.

It’s fitting that CNN’s interview with the iconic music star is taking place at an iconic hotel, which is like a second home to the former Beatle. This is where the Fab Four stayed when they first came to Hollywood in 1964, no doubt trailed by dozens of screaming girls and photographers as they ushered in the British Invasion.

The biggest reality show of the year cranks up the music again this week, as “American Idol” returns. Some thought the singing competition could never survive the loss of Simon Cowell, but judges Jennifer Lopez, Randy Jackson and Steven Tyler proved them wrong. This week kicks off with the infamous auditions, which are either your favorite or your most-hated part of the show. The countdown to someone standing in line in a ridiculous costume starts now. (Jan. 18 and 19, 8 p.m., FOX)

PASADENA, Calif. (AP) — NBC is funding an initiative to create musical theater programs in U.S. schools in need of arts education.

The network said Friday the effort to launch stand-alone musical theater programs will begin this month with a pilot group of 20 schools nationwide. NBC is joined on the Make a Musical project by iTheatrics, which adapts musicals for student productions and provides tools for teacher training.

The nonprofit iTheatrics’ Junior Theater Project aims to begin another 180 programs this fall, building toward a 2014 goal of 1,000 school programs reaching 1 million students, NBC said. Schools may apply for the fall program at the website makeamusical.org starting Friday.

NBC declined to put a funding amount on the initiative.

THE VILLAGES, Fla. (AP) — Singer and actress Kaye Stevens, who performed with the Rat Pack and was a frequent guest on Johnny Carson’s “The Tonight Show,” has died at a central Florida hospital. She was 79.

Close friend Gerry Schweitzer confirmed that Stevens died Wednesday at the Villages Hospital north of Orlando following a battle with breast cancer and blood clots.

Stevens, a longtime South Florida resident, performed with Rat Pack members including Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr. and Joey Bishop. She also sang solo at venues like Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas and the Plaza Hotel’s Persian Room in New York City.

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.

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Neil Diamond has been a hit maker for more than four decades, but the 70-year-old singer-songwriter says that when he’s alone in his studio, he sometimes wonders who will hear his music.

The answer, of course, is almost everyone, as evidenced by a stellar year that saw the “Sweet Caroline” singer inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, become a Kennedy Center Honoree, earn his 13th Grammy nod and release a career-spanning collection of greatest hits.

“The Very Best of Neil Diamond,” featuring 23 songs, was released last week, just after he returned from the Kennedy Center Honors in Washington, D.C., where he shook hands with President Barack Obama.

Singer-songwriter Jon McLaughlin recently released third CD debuted at the top of iTunes’ singer/songwriter top 200 albums chart. Chances are you’ve heard the charming Midwestern guy’s music in films and on television.

In fact, in 2008, he was nominated for an Academy Award for his hit “So Close” from the film “Enchanted,” that starred Amy Adams and Patrick Dempsey.

Check out Jon McLaughlin’s tour schedule.

On “The Early Show on Saturday Morning,” the 29-year-old Indiana native performed “Summer is Over” from his new release “Forever If Ever,” as well as his old hit, “Beautiful Disaster” in our “Second Cup Cafe” series.

She performed live in front of a television audience of millions week in and week out on Season 10 of “American Idol,” but at the Detroit Lions/Green Bay Packers game on Thanksgiving, Lauren Alaina’s nerves got the best of her as she flubbed the National Anthem.

Unlike Christina Aguilera, who, at last year’s Super Bowl actually sang the wrong lyrics to “The Star-Spangled Banner,” but kept singing, on Thursday, Lauren completely went silent for about five seconds in the middle of the song.

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.”

(PEOPLE.com) — While admitting again that she and Eddie Cibran made mistakes when they got together in 2009, LeAnn Rimes says there were tons of lies written about them, too — but that the couple kept quiet for the sake of his children.

“You have to really take the high road a lot of the time when you want to stand on a mountain and scream like, Why are you saying this?” the country singer, 29, said Thursday in an interview on “The Ellen DeGeneres Show.”