MUSICAL INTERPRETATION

I think the inspiration for this one was seeing some other puzzle where the juxtaposition of certain entries played into the theme. I just can't recall which puzzle that might've been. What I do recall is that this grid was rather tough to fill — tougher than you might expect given that there are only six songs in the grid (by the way, my title for this was the rather bland "Six Numbers"). Since the themed entries are not symmetrically placed, as I attempted to fill the grid cleanly, I'd constantly plunk a black square down in one area only to find I'd wiped out part of a themed entry in another area. For a long time I tried to squeeze in a seventh song (the Temptations "CANT GET next to YOU"), but I eventually gave up.

One minor inconsistency I just now noticed is that five of the themed entries has a preposition hinted at by the placement of the words/letters (AROUND, ON, IN, AFTER, BY), but not in the sixth (RISING).

I'm glad Will kept my clue for "Alibi IKE." As a boy, I remember my dad reading that short story to my brothers and me. It was one of the few times I saw Dad laugh so hard he was incapacitated. The other time I recall is when we went to see "It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World" at the theater in the early '60's. When Jimmy Durante died on that hillside, and his leg shot out and kicked the bucket, I thought Dad was going to need medical attention. Childhood memories like that are priceless.

A literal-interpretation puzzle, Peter did a good job of choosing six songs well-known enough that even this completely music-ignorant crossword solver managed to figure out most of them. I liked that each of the six literal interpretations (STAND is literally by YOUR MAN = STAND BY YOUR MAN) was done differently, and I really liked the R O C K around THE CLOCK. Very neat way to show that song!

For those of you that didn't quite get everything, the others are SMOKE on THE WATER, A TEENAGER in LOVE, TIME after TIME, and BAD MOON (literally) rising. I wasn't familiar with A TEENAGER IN LOVE, but it seems to Google well. I only vaguely recognized the tune, but that says more about my ignorance than anything.

Pete is right on when he talks about the difficulty of filling this grid. Although it's only six songs, many of them are two entries stacked together, making the crossing constraints difficult. Also, when you don't have completely symmetrical themers, placement of black squares can become really tricky. I did notice some compromises right off the bat, unfortunately in the NW corner, where they're bound to make a bigger impression on the solver. Getting a dose of A MIND crossing ASSOC, with ORA, ETTE, ETNAS makes for a good amount all at once. Pete does a pretty good job of keeping the rest of the puzzle relatively clean, though.

I'm glad Pete mentioned BAD MOON RISING, as it tripped me up. I did like the variety of ways he executed the themers, but NOOMDAB stuck out a little. Upon further thought, it's not that much different than LOATEENAGERVE (A TEENAGER in LOVE), so maybe that was simply a knee-jerk reaction to having a really rough time figuring out what that CCR song was.

I did like a lot of the fill, EMPIRICIST being my favorite. What an unusual word, but completely legit and something NYT solvers ought to know. STARDUST had a very nice clue to it too, and DICK AND JANE was a pleasure to see in the grid… after I finally forced myself to erase JACK AND JILL, of course. One of Dan Feyer's cardinal rules about solving is that you have to be willing to erase and not fixate on something you're "sure" is right. D'oh!

Finally, a really nice clue/entry pair for EDITORIALS. [Slanted writing] evoked IN ITALICS, CURSIVE, CALLIGRAPHY, and it was a nice a-ha when I finally figured out that "slanted" referred not to "tilted" but to "with a bias." Good stuff!