64. Change Your Tune

[MikeyG]

Cheez-Its: Nature's perfect food.

[Dow Jones]

Outstanding meta, Mikey !! It was hard (even with the nudges) but worth it. Thanks.

[rjy]

Wow, Mike, just wow. That juice was worth the squeeze, but man! that was a week's worth of squeezing. Brilliant!

Stay twisted, my friend!

[Qmark]

Made it with the help of the nudges...super job, Mikey...thanks!

[dudeski]

Jeez, Mikey. When do you have time to work?

[MikeyG]

Jeez, Mikey. When do you have time to work?

I have no idea, haha.

[MikeyG]

Okay, it's time for the official reveal, and I'll try to give a little more behind-the-scenes footage, haha.

First, the reveal:

Puzzle 64 answer: PEPPER

Correct entries: 46

Time spent on puzzle: 6 - 8 hours or so



(@BrennerTJ is an artist - I do get by with a little help from my friends!)

So, it would be pretty tough to do the "shortest explanation" for this one, and I'm happy this one did get Level 5 status! (If you got this as a solo solve, the most major of props to you!)

Here's how this all went down in my newfangled brain.

1. Keeping with the tradition of occasionally having numerical tie-ins, I was hoping to get this puzzle (a nice power of 2!) to involve the Beatles' "When I'm Sixty-Four." It's a McCartney chestnut that Lennon didn't like that much, but I still think it's a wonderful, vintage slice of charming, affectionate storytelling (if it's a little cloying, we'll let it slide). Apparently, it was one of McCartney's earliest compositions, and he wrote it at about age 14 (!!) or so!

2. I had a feeling if the prompt involved the song title itself, it would be pretty obvious (especially since I had an initially BEET / TULL or something like that in the anchor entries) what I was going for - and the scheduling did seem to imply I'd have a chance to get to Level 5, so let's see what I could come up.

3. Early on, I had the idea of changing one letter in various words in the song lyrics; I'm not sure how that came to pass. I think I looked up the initial album and figured PEPPER would be a good meta answer. The NOT SALT was my being goofy, and it added a tiny extra layer (one I was a bit nervous about but perhaps necessitating another Level 5-ism: the 6-letter prompt would seem to imply there were only 6 letter changes, not 7, in the grid. Even with symmetrical pairing, if you miss the one in the middle, you'll get NOTALT, which doesn't look like much!!).

4. But, of course, we couldn't just have those letter changes. How would we a) signal you would need the lyrics in the first place (going off-grid is a little bit avant-garde in metas) and then b) signal the actual song in the first place?

5. It's worth noting that WHENIMSIXTYFOUR is fifteen letters and would've made a great spanner! Had I done that and directly stated you'd need its lyrics, that takes this down from a Level 5 to a Level 3, I'd say. And it was admittedly tough to give up putting such a nice 15-letter entry in the grid.

6. Well, if we're changing the grid entries, we probably should try changing one letter in the title as well to mimic that part of the meta-nism (or at least compound upon it). I got the goofy THEN I'D SILTY POUR initially (with an apostrophe initially being in the grid) but then shifted to THEN ISM SILTY TOUR (forget why POUR went to TOUR).

7. Originally, this string was either going to be a) some ridiculous themer (not even sure how I'd clue that) or b) the title of the meta (I also floated "Don't Forget the Lyrics!" for a bit). I eventually glommed onto "Change Your Tune," since we are changing lyrics, and I liked that - but without the central spanner (made harder because BUMMER/SUMMER needed to be there), how would we signal the song?

8. The song entries were downs, which helped, and originally these ended in a word one different than the word itself (so, for instance, "Word commonly confused with 'than'" = THEN or "Trip guides might tout" = TOUR), but moving from that realization to the fact that you needed to make another change seemed too cumbersome. I give a shout-out to @oldjudge who made the great idea of just having a seemingly nonsensical "in song" appended to each entry, which seemed to do the trick. (A mini-Easter egg in that the first word of each of these clues begins with the character that gets substituted into the word).

9. So, ideally, a solver would eventually get the four words, make the four changes, and procure the title "When I'm Sixty-Four." The only clue that references "tune" is LYRIC, and the reinforcement of words alluded to there probably signals that we needed to go into the original lyrics of "When I'm Sixty-Four" and start finding entries that are one letter off (similar to what we did to formulate the title).

10. We had a standard @Cap'n Rick-ism by having symmetrical meta-related entries (which also necessitated the grid going to 15-by-16 due to the even middle entry). And I combed and combed but, even so, it was going to be impossible to prevent every single word in the lyrics from formulating with a change (i.e., YOUR can form from TOUR, but we already used that for the title; similarly, TILL can form from FILL, but I loved "FILL call-ins" too much to take it out).

11. But, still, I wanted some additional confirmation, so each of the clues for the seven entries ends in a word also found in the lyrics to "When I'm Sixty-Four" (I think @boharr was asking about this, and I forgot to get back (to where I once belonged), so I'm replying now). So, for instance, the clue for HARDY is "In robust form," and "form" is also a word in the lyrics. This was likely another Easter egg, and you didn't need to do anything with these words, but it just confirms that you're on the right track.

12. Once you make the seven letter changes, you get NOT SALT, and that turns it into PEPPER, a key word in the album title on which the song initially appears (recorded, of course, much after McCartney wrote it!) and the answer to the meta.

I noted after writing the puzzle, a day before it was to go live (or, rather, two days due to the power outage) that STILLIRISE was in the puzzle, and SPILL changing to STILL was kind of a semi-dupe, which I try to avoid. But I like the longer "bonuses" in my puzzles, so I kept it, and I don't think that caused too much concern (you had enough to worry about with this one, haha).

In any case, for those who braved even a fraction of this, I thank you deeply. Without the solver, the puzzle is just a series of blank squares and/or me throwing random clues into the void. I am always grateful for all of you for taking time to persevere and try to grok the elusive meta.

And to quote @MattGaffney, per here:

Every meta should be [fun]...except Week 5s. Those should be excruciating.

Thankfully, this was followed by a Week 1 that had more correct submissions for it within 24 hours than this did for its entire run. That's the idea, haha.

Thanks for reading all of this, a small window inside my puzzling brain. Off I go to solve logic problems, play with Ginger Cat (best cat ever), and cheer on my Chicago Cubbies. Until next time, fellow muggles!

Mikey G

[rjy]

Absolutely love that write-up, fascinating peek behind the scenes. Thanks for taking the time to share all that!