On the Charts: Lady Antebellum Retake Number One From Sade

The Big News: After spending the last three weeks at Number Two, Lady Antebellum's Need You Now recaptured the top spot from Sade's Soldier of Love in its sixth week on the Billboard 200, selling 126,000 copies to push past the platinum mark. After a three-week reign, Soldier of Love settled into Number Two with 79,000 copies sold. Below the resilient Top Two, four debuts lined up in Number Three through Six: Blake Shelton's Hillbilly Bone, American Idol finalist Danny Gokey's My Best Days, the Almost Alice soundtrack inspired by Tim Burton's new movie and Lifehouse's Smoke & Mirrors.

Gokey's Number Four debut marks the second-best Idol opening week by a Season Eight contestant. Adam Lambert's For Your Entertainment opened at Number Three in November 2009, though Lambert's debut week sales of 198,000 far exceeded the 65,000 Gokey sold. Gokey did out-chart Kris Allen's self-titled post-Idol (at Number 11 in November) and Allison Iraheta's Just Like You, which peaked at 35..

Debuts: Two more newbies broke into the Top 10: Raheem DeVaughn's Love & War Masterpiece at Nine and Easton Corbin's self-titled at 10. DJ Khaled's Victory debuted at 14, Peter Gabriel's covers album Scratch My Back bowed in at Number 26 and John Hiatt's Open Road scored 71..

Last Week's Heroes: In its sixth week, Lady Antebellum somehow managed a six percent upswing in Need You Now sales while Soldier of Love dropped off 37 percent. With the surge of debuts near the top of the charts, a bunch of Top 10 mainstays found themselves in the teens for the first time, like Lil Wayne's Rebirth and, after 15 weeks and 5.6 million copies, Susan Boyle's I Dreamed a Dream, which fell from Eight to 18. Next week, we'll see if Gorillaz' Plastic Beach can shake up the Top Two.

• 
  MUSIC 100 Greatest Debut Albums
• 
  MOVIES 'Star Trek' Is Crazy Good
• 
  TV 10 Shows to Watch This Summer
• 
  POLITICS No Price Big Banks Can't Fix

Song Stories

“Too Close”

Next | 1998

Next was formed in Minneapolis when the uncle of Terry "T-Low" and Raphael "Tweety" Brown, who was a gospel choir director, introduced the brothers to Robert Lavelle "R.L." Huggar. Sounds of Blackness singer Ann Nesby groomed the R&B group before handing them over to Naughty by Nature's KayGee, who wrote and produced "Too Close." The idea for the song was sparked "from a conversation we had with several girls at a nightclub," explained T-Low. "It's talking about the club scene, with guys getting out of hand and the female telling him to back up, asking, 'What are you doing?'" 

More Song Stories entries »

Twitter