Title: “The World Is Not My Oyster” by Pete Muller, Mack Meller, and Andrew White
Prompt: The meta for this puzzle is a famous rock group.
Answer: Dawes
Grid: 7ish
Meta: almost had it…
Now this one I should’ve had — was so close. The first hint was pretty subtle, tucked away at 58-D: [Like non-oyster months, traditionally] = R-LESS. This is a clever placing of the revealer answer: it’s not at the omega-across, but rather at its crossing point in the grid’s southeasternmost square. So it’s not random, but neither is it obvious, which it would have been if it were at the last across, so I very much like the sneakiness of this, compounded by the fact that R-LESS is one of those Scrabble-one-pointer-rich kinda-words that we don’t really blink at if we see them down there, like SEERESSES.
But my brain made the connection! “The World Is Not My Oyster” is the puzzle’s title, and our clue for 58-D mentions the oyster in the puzzle’s title. After a few false leads I made the connection between “R-less” and the R’s in the grid. I saw there were not that many R’s in the grid but couldn’t figure out what to do next. In a moment of weakness I sent out the bat-signal to a friend, and he pointed out to me how few *words* there are with R’s in them in the grid. That nudged me towards looking at them in a new way; if we put all the words containing an R together (acrosses only), we get:
BRING OTHER BRAND YOUR WARN TRIS DRAWERS
Remove the R’s and you’ve got, with appropriate spacing:
BINGO! THE BAND YOU WANT IS DAWES
Nicely done! 4.45 stars. Another original concept from Pete & the Gang. I’ve screwed up the first half of the year mightily but I’m going to treat the second half of the year as its own thing and blaze through it with 6-for-6. Vengeance will be mine! (shakes fist).
Like Matt, I saw the R-LESS clue had the word “oyster” in it, but I wasn’t really sure where to go from there. So I highlighted the R’s in the puzzle, and BRAND->BAND jumped out at me. It still took me longer than it should have to figure out what to do next, but I figured it out eventually.
One of my stumbling blocks was that I had never heard of the band named Dawes before. Looking at Wikipedia, they’ve had 9 studio albums, but it doesn’t seem like they’ve had a big mainstream hit. I don’t recall any previous Muller Meta answer that I had never heard of before, so I was hesitant to submit it, but it all worked out!
Thanks Matt!
241 correct this month.
Dawes is a famous band on the indie circuit (and one of my favorites!), but they are not “mainstream” famous. Our prompt could have been better.
Would be cool if you went 6/6 on the back half after your start!
PS I wanted to share our cover video this month which was especially fun to make. Special preview for Fiend readers as we release it in the write-up tomorrow:
https://youtu.be/7UkfZHXWpMg
Loved it! The fun comes through… thoroughly enjoyed. Cheers!
.
I saw DAWES in DRAWERS early but didn’t think they were famous enough to submit. Wasn’t until I found the full phrase that it clicked. Until then, I almost went with Pearl Jam. The logic: the initials for the r-less months are M J J A. You can use those to spell JAM and the pearl comes from the oyster clue and the title. The extra J and the fact that Pearl Jam was already used relatively recently (I think) and the general inelegance of it forced me to keep looking.
Never heard of them.
Unlike most times when I miss getting the meta, I’m not beating myself up over this one. To me, “famous” rock group was a misdirection on the level of the Saturday Stumper.
Well, I mean all you had to do was Google DAWES and you’re there.
I would say “kind of, but not really” to that. There are so many bands in the world, and as Pete mentioned, saying the band was “famous” in the clue implied that the band is mainstream-famous. I wondered if the answer required an additional wordplay step, where the answer was something like “Five Hundred Awes” or “Sawed Back” or “Mixed Up Wades.” There is a band called The Wades, a band called Awes, and the tool called a band saw (which wouldn’t be the answer but could have been the beginning of a path towards the answer). After exploring those options, none seemed to really fit, so I went with DAWES as the answer, but I don’t think it was that straightforward.
Yeah, not that this is relevant to the meta, but I still have a Pain Teens CD from back in the day. You can Google PAIN TEENS and find them, but I wouldn’t characterize them as “famous.”
While searching to find out if Dawes could be considered famous, I came across what they said about their 2023 tour: “We’ll all have to break out the catalogue master lists and bingo cards as we try to get to every song we’ve got.” So BINGO seemed like confirmation. Or was that a coincidence?
Complete (but very cool) coincidence!
I submitted Foo Fighters. Here’s why:
Six entries in the grid looked like they were ‘r-less.’ They are:
(R)ETAIL
STA(R)T
CHAI(R)
(R)EEL
D(R)AM
(R)UDDER
Take the first letters of those entries as they appear in the grid, and they anagram to ESCUED. Add an R at the beginning and you have RESCUED, which is the title of a Foo Fighters song.
I realize this is not the correct solution. I think it’s an example of how, with metas, an incorrect path can sometimes feel quite correct.
“Dawes” is a famous rock group? Hardly (in my mainstream-rock opinion).
I’ve never heard of them, and Wikipedia describes them as a folk-rock group. So I don’t know how they became worthy of a meta-solution.
.
.