People
NEW YORK — More than 25 years after its original publication, former President
Barack Obama's memoir, “Dreams from My Father,” will be released in a young adult edition.Obama had yet to hold any political office when “Dreams from My Father” was released in 1995. His account of his early years reached a vast audience after he ran for president in 2008 and is widely considered one of the best books ever written by a politician. “Dreams from My Father” has sold more than 7 million copies worldwide and has been translated into more than 40 languages.The young readers edition, announced Wednesday by Random House Children's Books, comes out Oct. 5 and will feature a new introduction by the former president.“The young man you meet in these pages is flawed and full of yearning, asking questions of himself and the world around him, learning as he goes,” Obama writes. “I know now, of course, that this was just the beginning for him. If you're lucky, life provides you with a good long arc.”Obama's wife, former first lady Michelle Obama, released a young readers edition of her memoir “Becoming” earlier this year.———LOS ANGELES — America's new No. 1 country song promises to show the door to anyone with complaints about the United States.“Am I the Only One,” by
Aaron Lewis — once known to rock fans as the frontman of the nu-metal band Staind — entered Billboard's Hot Country Songs chart in the top spot this week, becoming only the ninth song to debut at No. 1 on the closely watched tally.A stripped-down acoustic ballad built around Lewis' mournful baritone, “Am I the Only One” delivers the anguished thoughts of a proudly conservative guy troubled by what he views as the encroachments of so-called cancel culture — and does so just as country music is undergoing a public reckoning over its history of racism and discrimination.“Am I the only one not brainwashed?/ Making my way through the land of the lost,” he sings, “Who still gives a (expletive) and worries 'bout his kids/ As they try to undo all the things he did.” Elsewhere in the tune, which Lewis co-wrote with Ira Dean and Jeffrey Steele, the 49-year-old singer laments flags burning and statues coming down and wonders if anyone else “quits singing along every time they play a Springsteen song.”“Am I the only one willing to bleed/ Or take a bullet for being free?” he goes on, “Screaming 'What the (expletive) at my TV.”Asked what inspired “Am I the Only One” during a recent appearance on “Fox & Friends,” Lewis — who told the Anchorage Press last year that then-President Donald Trump's impeachment “couldn't have been more unconstitutional in shape or form” — replied, “I lived through the last year and a half … and I found myself on many occasions, just like all of you, sitting and scratching my head and wondering what is going on in this amazing country that we have.” (Lewis' representative didn't immediately respond to the Los Angeles Times' interview request.)“Am I the Only One” achieved its impressive chart showing thanks in large part to digital downloads, which Billboard measures along with streams and radio play in formulating its rankings. According to the trade magazine's tracking firm MRC Data, Lewis' single sold 58,622 downloads in its first week of availability — enough to land at No. 2, behind BTS' “Butter,” on the all-genre Digital Song Sales tally.Indeed, “Am I the Only One” outsold the No. 3 song on Digital Song Sales — Walker Hayes' “Fancy Like,” a viral hit on TikTok — by more than 150%. Lewis' track, which also racked up a relatively modest 4 million streams in the U.S., entered Billboard's all-genre Hot 100 at No. 14.
