Title: “Backbreaking Work” by Pete Muller, Mack Meller, and Andrew White
Prompt: The meta for this puzzle is the grid entry whose clue needs to be changed to make the meta mechanism consistent.
Answer: 5-Across / THE BEST, whose clue needs to reference the Tina Turner song
Grid: untimed
Meta: 12 minutes
I’m back in business, baby! After going 0-for-4 (!!) on the first four metas of the year, including January’s puzzle where I believe I was literally the only person who submitted an incorrect answer, I smoked this one out of park. If I had started solving at noon I woulda been in competition with Jangler for 1st place! Feels good to be back.
So we have an unusual-sized grid (13×19). The high vertical-to-horizontal ratio could mean many things, but one of them might be that he’s got a lot (maybe 5, 6, or 7) of shortish grid-spanning entries that he wanted to fit in. And this is indeed what was going on: I didn’t catch it at first, but they did turn out to be grid-spanning, at least with a few black squares in-between. My eyes were wandering across those entries when I spotted ENROL on the 12th row, which reverses to the name LORNE. My eye kept going and saw ERG and then ENE, which all becomes old-timey singer/actor LORNE GREENE. Rabbit caught!
The others work the same way, appearing on rows 10, 12, 14, and 15:
ROD STEWART (TRA/WETS/DOR)
VAN MORRISON (NO SIR/ROM/NAV)
JAMES TAYLOR (ROLY/ATS/EMAJ)
The aforementioned LORNE GREENE (ENE/ERG/ENROL)
TINA TURNER (REN/RUTA/NIT)
Now what? Well, four of those artists are mentioned in clues:
17-A: [Lorne Greene song about an outlaw] = RINGO
30-A: [James Taylor song about a place he’s never been] = MEXICO
53-A: [Van Morrison song that’s a tribute to a New Orleans music legend] = DOMINO
72-A: [Rod Stewart song about connecting with the divine] = SAILING
What clue needs to be changed? Contest answer 5-Across / THE BEST, which makes the meta mechanism consistent by including Tina Turner’s name in the clue (with something like [1990 Tina Turner hit]).
4.50 stars. Subtly well-hidden and unexpected…and I’m back in business, baby! New streak starts now. See you back here next month!
Thanks Matt-
Congrats on getting back on the horse!
221 correct this month…
One of the things I’ve learned from reading this column is that experience with constructing crosswords helps a lot with finding rabbits on these metas. I don’t think much about the size or shape of grids and I don’t always notice strangely worded clues. Room to grow, for sure!
Well it’s not a dead giveaway but it did give me a nudge. If you look at the clean, wide-open top and bottom sections of the grid, those are probably not where theme-related entries are constricting what entries have to fit there. Then compare that to the central rows, which have more 3- and 4-letter words and fewer long ones, and you can suspect that therein likely lies the meta.
Once I saw Tina Turner was missing from the clues, there were actually two choices. THEBEST stood out, but there was also APART, clued as “Separate Ways (Worlds ___)” (Journey Song) This could have been changed to “Tearing Us ___” (Tina Turner song with Eric Clapton) I chose this as the answer, since it was already clued as a song. Anyone else?
I was wondering if 47A was a hint to the missing meta clue: “Tina Turner song sung by 47A while driving her sons to school”
https://people.com/royals/prince-william-reveals-song-princess-diana-would-sing-in-the-car/
nope…but that’s a cool coincidence.
I got mislead on this one (and as it turns out a misspelling caused me to fill in egres instead of enrol) because the song clues all say “XXXX song about …” except the Van Morrison “song that’s …”
I took that to be the inconsistency and answered Fats Domino.
I managed to unsubscribe myself from Pete’s email list. I also got virtually no sleep for two or three nights in a row last week. It wasn’t until shortly before the contest deadline that I realized that not only had I not solved the meta, I hadn’t even done the puzzle.
I tried half-heartedly to get the meta just now (4 AM Thursday) and never saw the artists’ names.
Pretty clever even if I was nowhere near to getting the meta.