Chart Roundup: Rod Stewart Still Makes the Ladies' Hearts Flutter

• Rod Stewart, the man who topped the charts this week, selling 184,304 copies of his new album Still the Same - Great Rock Classics of Our Time, used to play in a cool band, which is why he can get away with wearing polka dot bow ties. Also noteworthy on the charts this week:

• Jimmy Buffett debuted at Number Four with his new album Take the Weather With You, which sold 121,361 copies.

• Did all the distinguished ladies buying Rod's album snap up copies of Jessica Simpson's record...  for their granddaughters? Simpson's album Public Affair jumped 14 spots to Number 117, selling almost as many copies this week as the Blood Brothers' new album, Young Machetes.

• Sting, who is rocking the classical music world with his new album Songs From the Labyrinth is also apparently rocking the rock world. The record sold 23,518 copies in its first week on the charts.

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Song Stories

“Piano Man”

Billy Joel | 1973

Billy Joel’s first hit, “Piano Man,” was – ironically – an autobiographical lament about how his first album wasn’t a hit. When Cold Spring Harbor didn’t take off, Joel briefly became a lounge pianist in Los Angeles, and this song, about that experience, expressed his frustrations and fears at the time: “And they sit at the bar and put bread in my jar/And say, ‘Man, what are you doing here?’” “It was all right,” Joel said later, about the gig. “I got free drinks and union scale, which was the first steady money I’d made in a long time.”

More Song Stories entries »

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