Title: “Taken Aback” by Pete Muller, Mack Meller, and Andrew White
Prompt: The meta for this puzzle is a famous singer whose last name is missing from the grid
Answer: Celine Dion, found by 279 solvers
Grid: 7ish
Meta: 12 mins
Dialed right in on this one; judging by the 277 right answers with 45 minutes left, it played pretty tough. I essentially just hopped from correct hunch to correct hunch and voila, meta solved. Wish they were all like that…
First thing we see is that we’ve got five singers horizontally across the grid:
18-A: [R&B singer with the 2018 song “Blue Lights”] = JORJA SMITH. Unfamiliar to me but Googles strongly.
36-A: [The most-followed singer on Instagram] = SELENA GOMEZ. 403 million followers?! Can that be real?!
39-A: [“Opposites Attract” singer who was an original “American Idol” judge] = PAULA ABDUL
41-A: [“The Queen of Disco”] = DONNA SUMMER
63-A: [“On & On” singer with five Grammys] = ERYKAH BADU
Before we move on, let’s take a moment to appreciate the lovely stacking of the three middle theme entries, with nary a scrap of glue needed to tie them together. Why would anyone even think to try this? But they did, and holy cow does it work. Gridcraft!
Now what? Well, as I boasted above, this one fell pretty quickly for me because I thought from the title that we might be taking a letter A from some entries. Then I noticed that the “A” sound in each first name in the themers could be dropped to leave another name:
JORJA SMITH = George
SELENA GOMEZ = Celine
PAULA ABDUL = Paul
DONNA SUMMER = Don
ERYKAH BADU = Eric
Clearly the right track, but now what? Well I saw CHURCH down at 71-A, hinting at this singer, and off to the races I went:
George + MICHAEL at 1-D = George Michael
Skipping Selena for now…
Paul + SIMON at 14-A = Paul Simon
Don + HENLEY 61-A = Don Henley
Eric + CHURCH at 71-A = Eric Church
So back to our missing answer for the meta answer: SELENA drops its last syllable to get CELINE, making meta answer CELINE DION the one celeb whose last name is missing from the grid. Nicely conceived and constructed!
4.75 stars. Novel and extremely well-executed idea. See you back here next month!
I loved this one, and it came to me right away. 1980’s pop music is my wheelhouse, so Paul Simon, Don Henley, and George Michael were very familiar. I had never heard of Eric Church, but searching a few potential names led me to him. (I could have submitted Celine Dion even without finding all the others.) It was a relief to get this one, since I’ve already failed at several months this year.