Then I was young and unafraid - and dreams were made and used and wasted

Continuing my trip back through the 2010 album charts.

10/01/10 : I Dreamed A Dream - Susan Boyle

This is a very important week because it heralded the arrival of our second born and coincidentally this is our second visit with Susan this year - it very much feels like an album I could choose to ignore, but I do have to admit it was a cultural phenomenon so I feel have to give it a go.  I'm very much not expecting to like it though.

And I very much wouldn't claim I liked it - but I also have to admit that it's not nearly as dreadful as I was expecting.  She certainly has a decent voice (it's quite Streisandy) and, in a few select places, I'd say she does a better job than most.  The title track ain't bad, "You'll See" (a Madonna cover) is actually quite good and "Up To The Mountain" is a much better stab at gospel than I'd imagine her managing.  However, I really didn't enjoy "How Great Thou Art" and the arrangement of "Daydream Believer" is frankly astonishing - it's super slowed down, which is so not what that song needs.  Tempo is an issue across the entire album - I do have a sneaking suspicion she never gets out of first gear because doesn't have any other gears to go to.  However, for those songs that it works for, I have to admit it works surprisingly well - it wasn't anywhere close to the traumatic experience I was expecting.

We're at #4 in the charts this week on her seventh week of a surprisingly short 23 week run - it did spend the first four weeks at #1 though, so I suspect it was a short run because absolutely everyone that was going to buy it had already bought it.  The rest of the top five were Paolo, Florence, Gaga and Bublé and the highest new entry was, quite obviously, Elvis Presley at #8.  And the only other new entry in the entire chart was a Journey best-of at #91.

Wikipedia has less than I was expecting on the album (181 milliPeppers) - it reminded me that she didn't actually win Britain's Got Talent (she was second behind Diversity) but she did OK out of it, I guess.  It doesn't bother discussing the critical response at all because it really doesn't matter - it sold 411,820 copies in the UK in its first week, which is the fastest selling debut album ever.  Its first week sales in the US were 700k copies and, despite only being released in late November, was the biggest selling album globally in '09.  It was #1 in the UK '09 year end list - it only made it to #2 in the '09 year end list, but made up for it by getting to #1 in the '10 year end list.  With total global sales of something like 10 million copies - madness!

"Customers also listened to" Charlotte Church (I bet she's made up to be on the list), Josh Groban (huh?), Katherine Jenkins and Paul Potts.  I think it's fair to say Susan hit a very specific market niche though, which turned out to be considerably larger than anyone was expecting.  And what I also wasn't expecting was to say nice things about this album - but a lot of it is surprisingly bearable (and in my book, that counts as a nice thing).

03/10/10 - An OK album with a fine cover
17/01/10 - Much better than I remembered