On the Charts: Springsteen Slips to Second as the Fray Lock Up Number One

The Big News: Post-Super Bowl sales weren't super enough to keep Bruce Springsteen's Working on a Dream at Number One. The Fray's self-titled second album, the band's first LP in four years, sold 179,000 copies to lock up the top spot. Working moved 100,000 units to settle into second place in what proved to be a bizarre week on the charts. In the past seven days country singer Dierks Bentley's Feel That Fire somehow scored the Number Three slot over Taylor Swift's Fearless and Beyoncé's I Am... Sasha Fierce.

Debuts: Other chart rookies include the superfluous Kidz Bop 15 at seven, the Red Jump Suit Apparatus' Lonely Road at 14 and Ben Kweller's Changing Horses at 92. Former American Idol contestant Melinda Doolittle sold 10,800 copies of It's Your Love to place at 58. The Heartless Bastards, who recently stopped by our Smoking Section for an awesome performance (check back soon to check it out!), landed at 150 with Mountain.

Last Week's Heroes: Franz Ferdinand's Tonight: Franz Ferdinand proved to be a one-week wonder, dropping from nine to 59. The only other two albums to fall out of the top 10 were Britney Spears' Circus, which dropped one spot to 11, and the 2009 Grammy Nominees album, which went from six to 12. Next week, we'll see if the Grammy Awards have more influence on shoppers' wallets than the Super Bowl. Look for Robert Plant & Alison Krauss' Raising Sand to go from 68 this week to the upper echelon next week. (Raising Sand sales already rocketed 286 percent in the two days following the Grammys as the album went from out of the Top 200 to 68.)

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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 »

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