Joseph Knecht

Lido Shuffle Today's constructor Amie Walker treats us to a sans circles, embedded, scrambled word theme.  We'll start with the reveal ... 58. Boz Scaggs hit with the lyric "One more for the road," and what can be found in 17-, 23-, 37-, and 48-Across?:  LIDO SHUFFLE .  The song was co-written by  David Paich  and was released on Scaggs'  1976 album  Silk Degrees  ...   Scaggs describes the origins of the work : "'Lido Shuffle was a song that I'd been banging around and I took the idea of the shuffle from a song that Fats Domino did called 'The Fat Man' that had a kind of driving shuffle beat that I used to play on the piano, and I just started kind of singing along with it. Then I showed it to  David Paich   and he helped me fill it out. It ended up being 'Lido Shuffle.'"  Among other things the title is a play on card shuffling  or life on the road , but the word Lido has many meanings . Here are the themers ... 17A. P...

 Music of the Spheres O vis eternitatis ( O force of Eternity ) Hildegard von Bingen I really liked this puzzle.  Today's constructors, Brent Sverdloff and Katie Hale , remind us that music is literally a universal language, a "force of eternity", recognized and appreciated not only here on Earth, but all over the Universe.  They demonstrate this with three theme clues filled with songs from different genres, each ending with the name of an extra-terrestrial body ...  16. *Frank Sinatra song:  FLY ME TO THE MOON .  A jazz standard written in 1954 by Bart Howard  ... 29. *Beatles song:  HERE COMES THE SUN .  A classic rock song written by Beatle George Harrison  ... 49. *Bing Crosby song:  SWINGING ON A STAR .  An American pop standard with music composed by Jimmy Van Heusen and lyrics by Johnny Burke . It was introduced by Bing Crosby in the 19...

  Breaking Up is Hard to Do Today's constructors are Owen Bergstein and Shannon Rapp . Shannon is a veteran and Owen is taking his opening bow on the Corner.  Their theme was a little unusual today as it is ROW  based rather than CLUE based.  To make that a little clearer I'll start with the reveal ... 62A. Tune that can soothe an aching heart, and a feature of rows 3, 5, 8, and 11 in this puzzle:  BREAKUP SONG .  To try to make that a bit clearer I've snipped the aforementioned 4 rows out of the grid to make them easier to annotate (don't worry I'll put them back in a bit).  Also I've left the original clues and fill in their original locations below. Here's ROW 3 :   The first thing we observe is that our constructors' "break up songs" are not necessarily sad songs (a la maestro Neil Sedaka in our opening number).  They are merely "broken up" by a BLACK space.  The second thing is that they are genres of songs, ...