Title: “Heads and Tails”
Prompt: The meta for this puzzle is a famous song and its singer.
Answer: “At Last” / Etta James, found by 466 solvers
February Muller Meta, and it almost got me! Got a late start (only solved the puzzle this evening), but hey it’s just February, right? Should be easy, right? Well…look at that dropoff, from 796 correct entries in January to just 466 (with 20 minutes left to play) this month. So highly missable — I’m guessing it’s much more missable than Pete and the gang intended!
I finished the grid and, with really nothing but the title to go on, starting looking at what “Heads and Tails” could mean. After 10 minutes, though, I could make neither heads nor tails (ba-dump!) of the thing. My pattern recognition setting was engaged, but where was the pattern in the noise? No obvious theme entries, with no truly long entries (10 letters was the longest, and only two of those). Scan-scan-scan and nothing…and then…
Scan-scan-scan-head-desk-head-desk-head-desk! It’s right there in the open! Nine of the long (for this grid) Acrosses end in AT, all symmetrically placed:
13-A: EUROBEAT
18-A: TIDAL FLAT
28-A: THREEPEAT
33-A: ALPINE GOAT
46-A: JET BOAT
55-A: AMEN TO THAT
60-A: MIAMI HEAT
75-A: EMPTY SEAT
78-A: STOOD PAT
The song suggested by that is contest answer “AT LAST” by Etta James. I was sort of wondering why Pete+ were requiring Etta James as part of the meta answer since her name isn’t specifically mentioned anywhere in the grid or clu — D’OH! There it is at the beginning of each of the nine theme entries! Dastardly!
This is an excellent example of a pattern-recognition meta (or a “Magic Eye” meta, after the popular visual images). You know it’s there but you can’t see it…you can’t see it…you can’t — OH THERE IT IS! HOW DID I NOT SEE THAT BEFORE?
4.70 stars. Great week 2. Lots of head-desking gonna happen when people see the answer here. Please record your heads hitting the desk and send to Diary of a Crossword Fiend (I’m kidding, don’t actually do this).
I’m 2-for-2 in 2025, and aim to keep it rolling in March. Until then!
Thanks so much Matt!
467 correct this month, so starting the year off fairly easy…but there were some long-time solvers who got stumped.
See you next month!
Pete
Fun puzzle. I actually spotted ETTA JAMES first and told my husband that I needed a song title to go with it. He immediately said “At Last,” which made perfect sense — but I spent another few minutes finding something in the grid to justify it.
The “heads” of the words “and tails” are AT.
Wasn’t that the intended interpretation of the title?
The heads spell ETTA JAMES, and the tails all say AT, so it’s AT LAST.
I almost got tricked here because the theme answers all end with -AT, and I tend to look at only the final letter, which was -T. So I was thinking about “Tea for Two” or a song about teasing or something along those lines for too long.
I almost missed the BRANDY (“BR and Y”) from a previous puzzle, and I think there was another one that I missed entirely for that reason. I gotta remember that I can’t look just at the last letter.