On the Charts: Diddy's Day26 Beat Panic at the Disco to Number One

The Big News: For the second week in a row, a Diddy-bred group topped the charts, as Day26's self-titled debut album reached Number One with 189,632 copies sold. Panic at the Disco's Pretty. Odd. debuted in second place, selling 50,000 fewer copies than Diddy's boy band. The Raconteurs' great experiment was a reasonable success, as the group's Consolers of the Lonely came in at number seven while selling 41,782 non-iTunes-leaked copies.

Debuts: Counting Crows' Saturday Nights & Sunday Mornings sold 106,263 copies to capture the third spot. The first B-52's album in sixteen years, Funplex, also enjoyed a solid debut, placing at number eleven. Other debuts included the WWE: The Music, Vol. 8 compilation at number twenty-four and Simon & Garfunkel's Live 1969 at thirty-three.

Last Week's Heroes: Danity Kane dropped from the top spot to number four to make room for three debuts. NOW 27 fell from two to five, while Rick Ross' Trilla went three to six and Flo Rida's Mail On Sunday sank from four to nine. Gnarls Barkley's The Odd Couple, which had something of a weak debut last week, rose from eighteenth place to the twelve spot despite a seven percent drop in sales.

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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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