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!