Blog Posts by Paul Grein

We will soon learn the identity of the 75^th winner of the Oscar for Best Original Song. It will either be from Slumdog Millionaire, which has two tunes in the running ("O Saya" and the joyous finale "Jai Ho"), or WALL-E, which has one ("Down To Earth," co-written by Peter Gabriel). If you haven't seen the movies, there's a good chance you haven't heard these songs. None of them has appeared on Billboard's Hot 100. But that's the way things have been going in this category in recent years. Six of the last eight Best Song winners failed to crack the chart. The only Best Song winners in the 2000s that have charted are Eminem's monster hit "Lose Yourself" from 8 Mile and "Falling Slowly" from Once, which reached a middling #61 last year. It wasn't always like this. Thirty-one of the first 54 Best Song winners reached #1. But in the past 20 years, only three winners have topped the chart: "A Whole New World (Aladdin's Theme)," "My Heart Will Go On (Love Theme From Titanic)" and "Lose

Three of the biggest winners from last week's Grammy Awards surge into the top 10 on The Billboard 200, but the #1 spot goes to an artist who wasn't even nominated this year. Taylor Swift, who performed on the telecast with fellow non-nominee Miley Cyrus, returns to #1 with Fearless. This is the second year in a row that Swift was passed over for a nomination for Best Female Country Vocal Performance, despite a long string of eligible hits over these two years including "Teardrops On My Guitar," "Our Song" and "Love Story." Last year, she was nominated for Best New Artist, but lost to Amy Winehouse. Though Swift hasn't gotten much Grammy love, she is receiving strong fan support. This is the ninth week on top for Fearless, which puts it in a tie with Santana's Supernatural and Usher's 2004 smash Confessions as the longest-running #1 album of the 2000s. (Supernatural had three additional weeks on top in 1999.)

The Robert Plant/Alison Krauss collaboration Raising Sand vaults from #69 to

Eminem is back in a big way. "Crack A Bottle," his new collaboration with Dr. Dre and 50 Cent, sold 418,000 downloads this week. That's the third fattest weekly tally ever, and the biggest total outside of Christmas week (when fans are feverishly redeeming gift cards). "Low" by Flo Rida featuring T Pain sold 467,000 downloads during Christmas week in 2007. "Just Dance" by Lady GaGa featuring Colby O'Donis sold 419,000 this past Christmas. "Crack A Bottle" enters Hot Digital Songs at #1 and surges from #78 to #1 on Billboard's Hot 100. It's Eminem's second #1 hit on the Hot 100, following the Oscar-winning "Lose Yourself," which logged 12 weeks on top in 2002-2003. It's also Dr. Dre's second #1, following  Blackstreet's 1996 hit "No Diggity," on which he was featured. It's 50 Cent's fourth, following "In Da Club," "21 Questions" (with Nate Dogg) and "Candy Shop (with Olivia). All three artists have upcoming albums. Eminem's album, Relapse, will be his first studio release since Encore

Raising Sand, the rootsy Robert Plant/Alison Krauss collaboration, was the Grammy magnet everyone expected it would be. The project won five awards, including Album of the Year, and, in a surprise, Record of the Year for "Please Read The Letter." That track beat out Coldplay's smash "Viva La Vida," but the English band still managed to win three awards, including Song of the Year.

This is the second time in less than a decade that a contemporary folk album produced by T Bone Burnett has been voted Album of the Year. The soundtrack to O Brother, Where Art Thou? won in 2001. Krauss has now won 26 Grammys, a total equaled by only one non-classical artist in Grammy history, Quincy Jones. The legendary producer has won 27 Grammys. Stevie Wonder is in third place among non-classical artists with 25.

If the big winner at the 51st annual Grammy Awards was a foregone conclusion, there were plenty of other surprises.

Adele won for Best New Artist over Jonas Brothers and Duffy, among others. Some

Bruce Springsteen's Working On A Dream enters The Billboard 200 at #1. It's the New Jersey native's ninth #1 album, which puts him in the all-time top five on the list of artists with most #1 albums. The Beatles lead the pack with 19 chart-toppers, followed by Elvis Presley and Jay-Z, with 10 each, and the Rolling Stones and Springsteen, with nine each. Except for Jay-Z, Springsteen is the most recent arrival on this list. He released his first album, Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J., in January 1973.

By landing his ninth #1 album, Springsteen surges ahead of Barbra Streisand and Garth Brooks, who have each amassed eight #1 albums.

Working On A Dream, which opened with sales of 224,000 copies, is Springsteen's fifth album to debut at #1. Three of the other four started with fatter first-week totals. The Rising bowed with sales of 525,000; Magic with 335,000; and Greatest Hits with 251,000. Of these five albums, only Devils & Dust had a slower first week. It started with 222,000.

Raising Sand, the collaboration by rock veteran Robert Plant and bluegrass queen Alison Krauss, is a shoo-in to win Album of the Year when the 51st annual Grammy Awards are presented on Feb. 8.

How can I be so sure? The album has a lot in common with two recent winners in that category. Raising Sand is an unlikely collaboration by artists from different genres, united by their love of music. That's the same basic formula that produced last year's winner, Herbie Hancock's River: The Joni Letters, in which the jazz veteran and six featured artists took on the music of pop legend Joni Mitchell. The album is also a rootsy slice of contemporary folk music, produced by T Bone Burnett. Sound familiar? Burnett produced the soundtrack to O Brother, Where Art Thou?, the 2001 album winner, which kick-started the Americana scene.

Here's the ultimate tip-off that Raising Sand will win: A track from the album, "Please Read The Letter," was unexpectedly nominated for Record of the Year. Raising Sand

Next Tuesday (Feb. 3) marks the 50th anniversary of the most famous plane crash in rock'n'roll history, an accident that took the lives of Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and the Big Bopper. Don McLean famously referred to it as "the day the music died" in his 1971 epic, "American Pie." Holly, who was just 22 when he died, holds a unique distinction: He had the shortest lifespan of any artist who has received a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award.

A surprising number of artists whose lives were cut tragically short have been voted Lifetime Achievement Awards by the Recording Academy. Twenty-two solo artists who died before their 50th birthdays have received the honor. This is remarkable because it's obviously harder to leave a significant legacy if you're denied the luxury of time. But few would argue that these artists did just that.

Drug and/or alcohol abuse played a role in many of these deaths. Given how much performers travel, it's not surprising that four of the 22 artists (Holly, Otis

Kelly Clarkson's "My Life Would Suck Without You" vaults from #97 to #1 on Billboard's Hot 100 this week. That sets a new record for the biggest leap into the top spot in the chart's 50-year history. The old record was held by Britney Spears' "Womanizer," which shot from #96 to #1 in October. Clarkson's song also enters the Hot Digital Songs chart at #1, after selling 280,000 downloads in its first week.

"My Life Would Suck Without You," the lead single from Clarkson's upcoming fourth album All I Ever Wanted, is her second #1 on the Hot 100. "A Moment Like This," her American Idol victory song, shot from #52 to #1 in October 2002. (At the time, that was the biggest leap into the top spot in Hot 100 history.) "Suck" is Clarkson's first #1 on Hot Digital Songs. Her 2004 smash "Since U Been Gone" just missed the top spot, though it has sold more than 2 million cumulative downloads.

(Incidentally, Clarkson's use of the word "suck" in the title is cheeky, but not unprecedented. The Rolling