On the Charts: Lady Antebellum Score Again Before Bieber Invasion

The Big News: After losing Number One to Ludacris last week, Lady Antebellum's Need You Now reclaimed the Billboard 200 top spot it's held for the majority of the last two months, selling 93,000 more copies in its eighth week. Ludacris' Battle of the Sexes slid to Number Three, behind the week's highest-charting debut, gospel singer Marvin Sapp's Here I Am, which moved 76,000 copies. The Edge compilation, a two-disc collection of active rock hits spanning the past two decades — think of it as Nu-but-old-Now! — took Number Four. Sporting tracks by Korn, the Bloodhound Gang, Alien Ant Farm and P.O.D., the comp of recycled songs somehow sold 53,000 copies this week, outselling Lady Gaga's The Fame by 5,000 copies according to Nielsen SoundScan.

Debuts: Only one more new release managed to crack the Top 20: The White Stripes' live album Under Great White Northern Lights, which moved 29,000 units to grab Number 11. Further down, the Drive-By Truckers enjoyed the best chart debut in their career as The Big To-Do placed at Number 22 in its first week, an improvement on Brighter Than Dark's Creation's Number 37 peak in 2008. The Dropkick Murphys' Live on Lansdowne, Boston MA entered at Number 25, Flobots' Survival Story came in at 43 and the Disco Biscuits' Planet Anthem danced in at 140.

Last Week's Heroes: Despite dominating the Hot 100 with a pair of hits, Ludacris' new disc took a 55 percent hit from its debut week sales. Gorillaz also saw the population of Plastic Beach drop by 66 percent as the animated band's third album fell from Number Two to Nine in its second week. It was a slow sales week as no albums managed to break the 100,000 mark, but next week Justin Bieber's My World 2.0 is all but assured big numbers and the Number One spot.

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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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