newsmakers

newsmakers

Nugent still fired up about music, politics

DETROIT

Ted Nugent scheduled interviews this week to talk about his new live CD and DVD set, but politics naturally entered the discussion as a partial government shutdown moves through a second week.

The 65-year-old Michigan rocker and staunch firearms and hunting advocate characteristically made no secret about where he stands, citing a recent piece he wrote for a conservative website titled “Make my Day, Shut it Down.”

“The government is so out of control. It is so bloated and infested with fraud and deceit and corruption and abuse of power,” he said Monday. “The American government today will go down, and the American people, it breaks my heart to say ... will go down as the dumbest, most unappreciative society in the history of humankind.”

Nugent said government overreach and incompetence goes back decades, but it’s at its worst under President Barack Obama. He described Obama as a “monster in the White House” who “wouldn’t qualify to drive my tour bus.”

Lauryn Hill allowed to tour before term ends

NEWARK, N.J.

Grammy-winning singer Lauryn Hill is being allowed to participate in a concert tour before completing her sentence in a tax case, her lawyer said Tuesday.

Attorney Nathan Hochman said Hill was permitted to work during the last six weeks of this year before finishing the balance of her three-month home detention.

Hill pleaded guilty last year to failing to pay taxes on more than $1.8 million earned from 2005 to 2007. The former member of the Fugees was sentenced in July to three months in prison and three months of home detention as part of a year of court-ordered supervised release. She lives in South Orange, N.J., and was sentenced in federal court in Newark. Her sentence also took into account unpaid state and federal taxes in 2008 and 2009 that brought the total earnings to about $2.3 million.

Hill was released Oct. 4 from a federal facility in Danbury, Conn., where she was released several days early from her three-month sentence, based on a number of factors the Bureau of Prisons takes into consideration, including good behavior, according to Hochman.

Taylor Swift sets songwriting record

NEW YORK

Taylor Swift has set a record with the Nashville Songwriters Association International.

The organization announced Tuesday that it would name Swift as its songwriter/artist of the year. This is her sixth win, beating out five-time winners Vince Gill and Alan Jackson.

The award recognizes Nashville acts that have achieved Top 30 singles. Swift has released 14 Top 30 songs from July 2012 through June 2013. She’s also the youngest artist to win the honor.

Her six awards will be displayed at the Taylor Swift Education Center, which opens Saturday at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum in Nashville. The 23-year-old singer donated $4 million to the center.

Cranston plays LBJ

NEW YORK

Bryan Cranston will surprise Broadway audiences when he portrays President Lyndon B. Johnson after being so closely associated with his “Breaking Bad” anti-hero, says the producer who is luring the actor to a New York stage.

“It’s truly a transformative performance, I think. I don’t use that word lightly,” says Jeffrey Richards, who is producing the Cranston-led “All the Way,” which just concluded its run near Boston. “It’s especially thrilling to see an actor embody a role the way that he does.”

Cranston plays Johnson during his first year in office after the assassination of John F. Kennedy and explores both his fight for re-election and the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. It’s by writer Robert Schenkkan, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1992 for his epic “The Kentucky Cycle.”

Associated Press