On the Charts: Lil Wayne Leads the Way as Plies, MMJ Debut in Top 10

The Big News: There was Lil Wayne, and then there were 199 other albums. Light years behind Tha Carter III at number two was rapper Plies' Definition of Real, which sold 215,000 copies. Third place went to Now! 28, last week's champ Disturbed and their Indestructible fell to four and Usher's Here I Stand claimed fifth. Tha Carter III wasn't the only album to go platinum, however, as Mariah Carey's E=MC² and Robert Plant and Alison Krauss' Raising Sand both crossed the million sales threshold last week, while the Eagles' Long Road Out of Eden passed three million in sales.

Debuts: Outside the big rap debuts, a trio of rookies claimed the 7-8-9 spots, as N.E.R.D.'s Seeing Sounds, Alanis Morissette's Flavors of Entanglement and My Morning Jacket's Evil Urges all cracked the top 10. Emmylou Harris' All I Intended to Be bowed in at 22 with 27,000 copies and the Wallflowers' Jakob Dylan and his solo Seeing Things entered at 24.

Last Week's Heroes: Weezer's Red Album suffered from a 64% sales drop from its debut week, stumbling from four down to ten. Journey's Relevations held surprisingly strong though, only falling one spot down from five to six in its second week on the charts. Not as fortunate was Ashanti and her controversy-causing The Declaration, dropping from six to thirteen. Next week, we'll find out if Coldplays Viva La Vida can make a run at Lil Wayne's 2008 sales record, having already gone platinum in their native U.K..

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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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