solving a meta
Crossword puzzles are a passion of mine, and I create a monthly music-themed crossword called the Muller Monthly Music Meta. I've put together some puzzle solutions with hints to see if you can figure out the meta for each month on your own!
Check out April's solution below and see if you can figure out the Meta.
No judgments made if you need to use the hints!
what is a meta?
A meta crossword puzzle provides the ultimate “aha” moment for a solver. First popularized by Matt Gaffney (who runs a great weekly contest), a meta challenges the solver to come up with a single answer somehow hidden in the puzzle. Hints to the answer can come from the title, the theme entries, the clues, the grid, or any combination of them.
If I’ve done my job as a constructor, once you get the meta, you’ll know it. If you’re thinking, “Hmmm … maybe this is it,” you probably haven’t found the meta yet!
Metas are well suited to contests, since it’s hard to cheat on a meta. An obscure crossword clue like [Nickname for President Van Buren, from his birthplace] can be answered in a second using Google (“OLD KINDERHOOK”), but you can’t do the same for a meta. While googling is considered cheating (to some) in solving a crossword, googling is encouraged in solving metas.
As described in the Contest Rules, the meta answer for each puzzle will be a reasonably well-known song, band, album, or something else music-related. Metas will usually reflect my musical taste, which is pretty varied. The answer will usually be reasonably well-known to me, and hopefully to you too. If it’s not, it will definitely be accessible via a web search.
For a primer on metas, you can check out the Matt Gaffney/WSJ guide here and the WSJ’s interactive tutorial here.