Jack Johnson's 'Sea' Explodes on the Charts

After weeks of slow sales and chart-toppers who moved less than 100,000 copies of their discs, Jack Johnson's newest disc To the Sea exploded out of the gate, cruising to Number One on the Billboard 200 with 243,000 copies sold in its debut week. According to Nielsen SoundScan, 114,000 copies, nearly half Johnson's total, came courtesy of digital downloads. To the Sea also marks Johnson's third consecutive album to top the charts following 2006's Sing-A-Longs and Lullabies for the Film Curious George and 2008's Sleep Through the Silence, which moved 375,000 copies in its first seven day.

The rest of the Top 10 remained largely unchanged. Last week's champ Glee, The Music, Volume 3: Showstoppers dropped down to Number Three with 45,000 copies while Justin Bieber's My World 2.0 captured Number Two with 52,000. New arrivals didn't provide much sales relief — besides Johnson only Taio Cruz's Rokstarr managed to break into the Top 10, debuting at Number Eight with 24,000 copies.

On the Hot 100, Katy Perry's "California Gurls," which debuted four weeks ago, finally made its way to Number One making it the fastest-climbing Capitol single since the Beatles' "Penny Lane" and Bobbie Gentry's "Ode to Billie Joe" accomplished the same feat back in 1967, Billboard reports. "California Gurls," which will likely receive a boost thanks to Perry and Snoop Dogg's performance at the MTV Movie Awards, sold 318,000 downloads last week to lead digital singles for the third consecutive week. Perry also brought to an end Usher's "OMG" run at Number One.

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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.”

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