When you open up today’s puzzle, your first impression might be that it looks fairly strange. There are big clusters of black squares all over the grid — 117 black squares overall, which is by far my highest number of black squares in a 21×21 puzzle that I can recall. The grid itself looks vaguely circular; perhaps it resembles an LP or a CD if you squint?
On first glance, there doesn’t appear to be much theme material, either. Two pairs of adjacent pop songs in the middle of the grid contain circled letters that spell out NEW and IDEAS across black squares, and another two pairs of pop songs do the same thing at the bottom.
- 44A: [John Lennon song described in Rolling Stone as “an enduring hymn of solace and promise”] is “IMAGINE” and 46A: [Spice Girls song that’s the first track on their debut album “Spice”] is “WANNABE.” These songs combine to form the word NEW across a black square.
- 69A: [Roxette song with the lyric “I had to jump in my car”] is “JOYRIDE” and 70A: [Harry Styles song whose title suggests that things aren’t like they used to be] is “AS IT WAS,” forming IDEAS across a black square.
- 87A: [Elton John song with the lyric “You’re all I’ve ever needed”] is “THE ONE” and 88A: [Maroon 5 song that sounds like a command to be patient] is “WAIT,” forming NEW again.
- 105A: [Goo Goo Dolls song parodied on “Sesame Street” as “Pride”] is “SLIDE” and 106A: [Elvis Presley song with the lyric “I’ll answer yes”] is “ASK ME,” forming IDEAS a second time.
The phrase NEW IDEAS describes the “novelty” of the title “Novelty Songs,” but there must be more to this, right? There is. In the southeast corner are a pair of crossing answers that point you to the rest of the theme. 104D / 107A: [With 107 Across, list that eight songs in this puzzle appeared on … and a hint to the numbered squares that spell out a quote from Blur frontman Damon Albarn] is TOP FORTY. So the eight songs listed earlier were Top 40 hits, but the real kicker is the second part of that clue. Read the squares in the top of the grid numbered 1 through 40, and you’ll find Albarn’s quote from a November 2009 interview in the Guardian:
“POP MUSIC IS A GREAT PLACE TO GET NEW IDEAS ACROSS.”
I don’t often build puzzles with quote themes. Most of the time a quote is presented in a puzzle with four or five long Across answers and clues such as [Start of a quote by {insert author here}], [Part 2 of the quote], etc., and the only payoff is piecing together the whole quote and hoping it conveys a decent punchline at the end. So the few times I have written a Sunday crossword with a quote theme (as in “Text Message” from August 2019 and “It’s a Start” from July 2021), I tried to hide it in an unconventional way to make the discovery a bit more surprising.
That’s not to say that standard quote puzzles are easy to construct. It still takes legwork to find a suitable quote that can work for whichever crossword one makes. Generally you need something that will be amusing and can break up into nice symmetrical pieces, and a lot of quotes just don’t work like that. I threw theme symmetry out the door because I had a different set of constraints that were tough to deal with in their own way. First, obviously, the quote had to be about pop music. Second, I wanted it to convey an idea that I could represent as its own theme elsewhere in the puzzle, with whichever pop songs I could find.
But by far the biggest issue is that it had to be exactly 40 letters long, and it had to appear in a very specific location. That’s because I’d had the phrase TOP FORTY on my mind, and I was set on hiding the quote in the first 40 numbered squares. Even if I found a good 40-letter quote, the idea might still have been dead on arrival if the letters themselves wouldn’t cooperate in the way that I needed. With most quote puzzles, you can separate the theme answers by a number of rows and give yourself some space to fill in the rest of the grid. But in this crossword, the quote letters had to be in the first 40 numbered squares, with no exceptions. (Recall that in last week’s metapuzzle I needed 10 letters to appear in specific numbered squares; now I needed 40 of them.)
Of course there were some frustrating near misses with some other quotes I found, too:
- “Sometimes with pop music, you have to see it to love it.” — Adele, as published in Elle in February 2011. I really liked this one because “you have to see it to love it” could sort of describe what it’s like to be pleasantly surprised while solving a crossword. Alas, it’s 43 letters long.
- “Pop music can’t be described, but quantified.” — attributed to the Empire musician Mattia Collucia. It would work very nicely with the concept of numbers, but I couldn’t find further attestation to confirm it, and even if I could, it was 36 letters long, anyway.
- “The perfect pop song is about creating a memory.” — the Bananarama singer Keren Woodward, as published in Classic Pop in January 2019. This would work great; I could find songs that either deal with memory or literally spell out MEMORY, and if it’s a good puzzle it would be memorable … and it’s 39 letters long. I can’t tell you how fast my head sank into my hands when I counted 39. So close, but no cigar.
Then I found Albarn’s quote, and I actually miscounted it at first! That’s because Albarn started it with “I think,” and I included that in the count without realizing for maybe an hour that if I just chopped the first six letters off, I was set. It’s lucky I checked it a second time; the adrenaline rush I got from seeing “40 characters” show up in my word processor was huge. (Yeah, there’s a nerdy sentence I wouldn’t have imagined writing 20 years ago. Such is my life.)
Finally, I realize that pop music can be sort of hazardous territory when it comes to crosswords. People’s taste in music is very personal, and not every solver enjoys encountering Top 40 music (or even pop culture generally) in their puzzle. But pop music isn’t what originally inspired this puzzle; the phrase TOP FORTY did. It inspired me for a different, personal reason of my own — tomorrow I’m turning 40 years old. I figured if I’m about to hit a big milestone birthday, I might as well celebrate it with something ambitious and, ideally, a fun payoff.
I hope you enjoyed the puzzle. On to the next 40 years.