Every month, The New York Times publishes a bonus crossword puzzle for subscribers. They are designed to have the difficulty of an early-week puzzle and to use a theme throughout. The theme of this month’s puzzle, by Christina Iverson, a puzzle editor, and Jeff Tweedy, a Grammy-winning musician best known as the frontman of the band Wilco, is rock music.
The first album I purchased with my own money was Green Day’s “American Idiot.” Besides relishing the victory of convincing my parents to let me buy a record with a parental-advisory sticker on it, I also remember how excited I felt to start my very own CD collection, one that I hoped would eventually rival my dad’s in scale and scope. My dream of building a shining city of CD towers was short-lived. The iPod arrived; my music collection and consumption went digital.
Suddenly granted unprecedented access to music, I began ravenously downloading albums — some from iTunes, some from less-reputable sources, their MP3s with file names like “REDHOTCHILIPEPPERS_REAL_ACTUAL_YES.” I devoured discographies, traded playlists with friends and scoured online forums such as Blalock’s Indie Rock Playlist and The A.V. Club. That’s how I discovered many of the rock acts that appear in this month’s bonus puzzle, as well as one of its constructors: Jeff Tweedy, a Grammy-winning musician and frontman of the indie rock band Wilco.
Wilco continues to be an enormously influential and popular band, especially in its hometown, Chicago. When I moved to the city in 2017, my first stop wasn’t the Bean or the Art Institute — it was Marina City, the towers on the cover of Wilco’s hit record “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot.” At the Pitchfork Music Festival in 2022, I watched Tweedy join Michelle Zauner, the lead singer of Japanese Breakfast, for a performance of the Wilco song “Jesus, Etc.” The Chicago crowd’s reaction almost drowned out the opening notes.
You can count this crossword’s other constructor, Christina Iverson, among Wilco’s superfans. “If you added up the amount of time I have spent listening to music over the course of my adult life, I have probably spent more time listening to Wilco than anyone else,” she told me. The constructors convened online several times to collaborate on this puzzle — and actually met in person before one of Jeff Tweedy’s solo shows. Tweedy even spent some time working on it on the tour bus between gigs.
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