Mike Shenk’s Wall Street Journal contest crossword, “Singing Out” — Conrad’s writeup.
This we’re looking a singer of a sort. There were five thematic singers in the grid in firstname/lastname format. I stared at those for a while and found no signal. I checked the final horizontal entry (where Mike often stashes a clue): no signal. Then I spotted the symmetric SIDE/FOUR (16 and 66 across, collectively clued as: Setting of “Ball and Chain” on Janis Joplin’s album “In Concert.” Another musical clue, and symmetric. Knowing Mike’s style: that had to be relevant.
WSJ Contest – 11.24.2024
I pondered side four for a bit, and decided to look at the “out”-er 4 letters of the themers (two on either side). I had the rabbit: the outer two letters each formed a four-letter words that mapped to another grid entry. Here they are in theme entry order:
- (TI)NATURN(ER): TIER -> STANDS (Stadium part)
- (PA)TTILABEL(LE): PALE -> ILL (Looking sick)
- (BA)RBRASTREISA(ND): BAND -> RING (Wedding symbol)
- (RO)BERTAFLA(CK): ROCK -> EMO (Music genre)
- (FA)ITHEVA(NS): FANS -> NUTS (Enthusiastic devotees)
The first letters of the mapped entries spell our contest solution SIREN. And while writing this up I noticed that all of the matching entries had two word clues. Nice touch! Solvers: please share your thoughts.
That was a nice meta but I never even got close!
I must be getting better at these or else Mike Shenk is making them easier. My only holdup was having written OVA SAC instead of OVISAC and I thought the answer across was SADE, another singer. Once I corrected that, I realized SIDE FOUR was the key, as you say, and I heard the SIREN wail. Great fun.
Knew that SIDE FOUR was the key, but tried many other interpretations of that except the right one.
Likewise!
I was distracted by the “Singing Out” title. I think the first three DIVAs (a nice touch) are considered gay icons, though I don’t know about FAITH EVANS (a name I don’t recognize). (And where do I get to vote on these gay icons anyway?)
I got a hint to look at the first two and last two letters of the singer’s names, which confirmed my suspicion that SIDE FOUR was part of the meta.
And then I screwed up by matching PALE to 48A GASP (defensible if you think about it) and ROCK to 71A OAKS (wrong kind of ROCK and a stretch linguistically).
My incorrect entries got me RNGSO, which is so close to RINGO (Starr) that it had to be right. I tried to find a way to substitute an I word for STANDS, but STANDS was obviously correct.
So I rationalized my answer with what is one of the most well-known Beatles lyrics that RINGO sang: “What would you do if I sang out of key?”
I should have known that Mike Shenk would not have given us something that clunky.
I couldn’t get off the fact that every song title used for the theme clues comes from an album with the same title. What a rabbit hole.
This was absolutely what prevented my solve as well. I figured that with a “theme-assist” clue that mentions a song on an album, it could not possibly have been coincidental that all five of the theme songs mentioned came from same-title albums, and that the side / track positions of the songs in their eponymous albums must be the key.
It’s not so surprising for a well-known song chosen at random to be the name of the album, but all five? I have to think this must have been an intentional choice by Mike. I’m sure it was intended as adding “elegance” but this was the biggest distraction I’ve encountered in a metapuzzle in a long time.
All that said, finding 5 examples of common words made up from the first and last bigrams of well-known singers is pretty awesome.
Another brilliant meta by Mike Shenk, but I’ll never solve them. And I only solve about 10% of Matt Gaffney’s metas. (Woe is me…)
Thankfully I tied SIDE and FOUR together as part of the meta almost immediately and was off to the races. I like solves like that, instead of late Sunday agonizing.