On the Charts: Alicia Keys, "Juno" Lead Another Sluggish Sales Week

The Big News: Alicia Keys retained the Number One spot for the second straight week, selling 60,519 copies of her third album As I Am. Keys managed to fend off the Juno soundtrack, which came in at Number Two after moving 57,536 copies in its third week on the chart. Mary J. Blige's Growing Pains crossed the platinum plateau on its way to third place, while 46,141 people paid for a copy of our current cover stars Radiohead's In Rainbows.

Debuts: Neo-soulster Raheem DeVaughn had the biggest debut, as his Love Behind the Melody sold 44,903 copies for fifth place. At seven, John Legend's only-available-at-Target Live From Philadelphia sold 32,809 copies. The Magnetic Fields' Distortion entered the charts at seventy-seven, while Ringo Starr's Liverpool 8 came in at ninety-four.

Last Week's Heroes: The Eagles' Long Road Out of Eden finally dropped out of the top ten after twelve weeks, as Don Henley's boys and Garth Brooks' Greatest Hits were ejected to make room for DeVaughn and Legend. Other than that, the top ten stayed mostly the same with some minor reshuffling, with Juno — aided by a bunch of Oscar noms for the film — sure to make a play to take over the top spot by next week.

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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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