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

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

“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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