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.)

• 
  MUSIC Exclusive Live Chat With Linkin Park and Incubus
• 
  MOVIES & TV Peter Travers: 'The Avengers' Has it All
• 
  POLITICS Matt Taibbi: Jon Corzine Is the Original Zimmerman
• 
  VIDEOS Exclusive Premiere: Tenacious D's 'Tinnitus'

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.”

More Song Stories entries »

Twitter