On the Charts: Taylor Swift Continues Holiday Dominance as Cole, Foxx Debut Strong

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The Big News: Taylor Swift's Fearless continues to be the stocking stuffer of choice this Christmas, selling another 330,000 copies to keep its iron grip on the top spot. Keyshia Cole's A Different Me was close behind, moving 322,000 copies its debut week to nab Number Two. Actor-crooner Jamie Foxx's Intuition took third with 265,000 copies sold. And in the battle of Britney vs. Beyoncé, Circus edged I Am... Sasha Fierce by a mere 318 copies to claim the fourth spot. Circus is now only 100K albums away from platinum, a feat both Nickelback's Dark Horse and the Twilight soundtrack will accomplish next week.

Debuts: While Cole and Foxx were scoring big, Fall Out Boy and their Folie A Deux were floundering, selling only 150,000 copies to land at a distant eighth on the chart. Three more rookies managed to hit the top 20 in their opening weeks: Anthony Hamilton's Point of It All at 12, Plies' Da Realist at 14 and the All-American Rejects' When the World Comes Down at 15. And just to get in the Xmas spirit, Weezer's Christmas With Weezer cracked the charts at 173.

Last Week's Heroes: Swift continues to be Every Week's Hero, single-handedly restoring the music industry's faith in Christmas, with a 33 percent sales increase over last week's weak totals (sales were still down 33 percent from the same week last year, however.) Of the artists that fell out of the top 10, Kanye West's 808s & Heartbreak dropped from six to 11 despite a 10 percent sales increase.

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Song Stories

“The Everchanging Spectrum of a Lie”

The Joy Formidable | 2011

The opener off the Welsh group’s The Big Roar album was an epic one, but the band was worried that track had polarized fans. “The first song is eight minutes long,” Rhydian Dafydd, the Joy Formidable bassist, said. “If you did that in the Seventies people would be, ‘Whatever.’ You do it now, people think, ‘Holy s---!’ Some people think it’s the f---ing greatest track on the entire album, and some people think it’s f---ing boring. It’s that element of needing to challenge people.” The band concluded through the song’s lyrics that love was the “everchanging spectrum of a lie.”

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