Title: “Stoneground”by Pete Muller, Mack Meller, and Andrew White
Prompt: The meta for this puzzle is a famous rock band.
Answer: PEARL JAM, found by 797 solvers
Solving time: puz: forgot to note time, meta: 3 mins (Matt G.)
(3.85 avg; 10 ratings) rate it
Are you 4-for-4 in 2025? I am! Undefeated, undaunted, untaunted, and unhaunted. But fully aware that I may be humbled soon when Team Muller brings the heat…stay tuned…
April’s puzzle was both clever and easy, which is a tough combo to pull off. By entry lengths it looked like we had three theme entries, and turns out we did indeed: (voice-over: “actually, there were five…”)
20-A: [Dolmas, more familiarly] = STUFFED GOEAVES. Raise you hand if you thought for a moment during your solve that “stuffed goeaves” might be a delicacy you just hadn’t heard of. Oh, come on! I can’t’ve been the only one.
36-A: [Types in a dating app bio?] = SEXUOFERENCES. Wha?
54-A: [Energy producers targeted by a famous 1979 rock concert series] = NUCOOWERPLANTS. I am so sick of seeing the entry NUCOOWERPLANTS in crosswords. It’s in every other puzzle these days!
Alright, so what’s going on? Clearly these three answers want to be STUFFED GRAPE LEAVES, SEXUAL PREFERENCES, and NUCLEAR POWER PLANTS. Note that each of these entries contains a certain quintet of letters in whatever order:
STUFFEDGRAPELEAVES
SEXUALPREFERENCES
NUCLEARPOWERPLANTS
Those five letters anagram to PEARL. If you put those five letters into one box, you might well say that that box is a “pearl jam,” since all the letters in PEARL are jammed into one square.
So I like this, but it does bother me aesthetically that the PEARL boxes don’t work on the downs. Unless I’m missing something, which does happen on occasion, it looks like the mix of five letters just doesn’t play on the down entry.
But wait! In all three cases, the letter on the down is an O, which looks suspiciously spherical, like, say, a pearl…so you are taking the letters in PEARL and jamming them into a pearl-shaped O. Now that is an inspired twist! I try not to speak on behalf of Mr. Eddie Vedder, but I suspect he would find this amusing.
And just now I’m seeing we have five PEARLS, not three! At 5-A we have EARPL(UGS) instead of just OUGS, which isn’t a thing, and a symmetrical PARLE(YED) instead of OYED. Whoa!
4.75 stars. I hope I didn’t miss any other PEARLs JAMmed into this grid!
Thanks Matt!
A record high 798 solvers this month!
Grid was challenging, but once you got through it the meta was pretty apparent.
This month’s meta song is “Just Breathe,” one of my favorite Pearl Jam tunes.
Count me as another who missed the 2 PEARLS. Nice to have a Pearl stuffed in the stuffed grape leaves.
I’m guessing that the band’s guitarist Stone Gossard had something to do with the title.
pannonica, thanks for clarifying. I was confused making the connection between the title and the meta here. Usually, the title is reference to the method of the meta (“Famous Last Words”) rather than the answer itself.
I was thinking it meant you grind up the stone (the “O” [pearl]) to get its constituent parts (P-E-A-R-L).
…it was more that the PEARLS (O’s), which are gemSTONES, were “ground” up in the grid.
The rebus also is a visual echo of Spin The Black Circle, a great early PJ rocker.