Solution: Folk Wisdom

Answer: WHISKEY BOTTLE

Written by Ella Sheffield and Adeline Wong

The solvers begin with a list of audio files, grouped, and a list of rebuses. The first thing that the solvers may feel inclined to do is to identify the songs and who sang them. Doing so results in the following list:

The rebuses are less immediately intuitive. Understanding what to do with these requires two key observations. The first is that the flavor text indicaes that there is "extra imagery" in the puzzle - this may indicate to solvers that there are some images in the rebuses that won't be immediately useful. Armed with this knowledge, they can then begin to realize that each rebus has a set of images that corresponds to one of the singers of the songs in the audio files, with some number of extra images. The phrase "count on" in the flavor text indicates that the number of extra images is relevant.

At this stage, the solvers now have some lists of strings associated with numbers. There's nothing to do but index! The song titles have not yet been used, so it is natural to attempt to index into them. The rebus order appears arbitrary, so using this as the extraction ordering makes sense.

The resulting cluephrase from this step is CHAIN LYRIC TO BRUEGEL PROVERB. Googling the phrase "bruegel proverb" gives the painting Netherlandish Proverbs, with a handy Wikipedia page that contains a lot of nicely sorted data. (Sharp-eyed solvers will also connect the capitalization of "Elders" in the flavor text to Peter Bruegel the Elder.) At this point, the extra images in each rebus start to make sense. Each of them can map to a proverb from the painting, resulting in an association between songs and proverbs.

In order to form a chain, solvers should realize that they need a second association for each proverb/lyric pair. At this point they may realize that the meanings of the songs line up with the meanings of the proverbs, and that they can associate them that way. The groupings of the lyrics indicate a self-contained chain (which can be easily discovered from the associations between the pair In Bottles and A Picture From Life's Other Side). This will result in a set of chains that looks like this:

The solvers have now nearly finished this massive puzzle! All that they need to do now is extract. The solvers have chaining associations, and the one piece of information from the painting that they haven't used is the position of the proverb on the painting. The last thing to do is to draw the chaining connections onto the painting itself. Doing so will get an image that looks like this:

These shapes can be read as letters: ADVICE. They can call it in!

Hahahaha, they thought they were done. Nope, it's action submission. Once they submit an image of themselves interpreting a proverb literally, they can get their actual answer: WHISKEY BOTTLE.

Author’s Notes

Ella: This puzzle, as you may be able to guess, was born from a dataset. I mean come on, no puzzler can open the Netherlandish Proverbs wikipedia page and not immediately see the puzzle potential. The question then simply became what to do with this dataset. My ideas went through a lot of iterations before settling into the monstrosity you see today - let's just say that I've spent more time staring at this painting than would perhaps be considered "reasonable" or "sane".

When I was constructing this puzzle, there were concerns among the writing team that no one would want to solve such a long puzzle, particularly one with such a heavy audio component. The original version of this puzzle had 36 song/proverb pairs, rather than the unfortunately red-herringy 26 that we pared it down to, and arguments were made that this was simply too much to expect anyone to sift through. My response to this was, largely invariably, "let the solvers suffer", and I stand by this sentiment.

The question on your mind at this point is probably "but how did you even go about finding 36 26 folk songs with lyrics that corresponded to the meanings of antiquated Dutch proverbs?" The answer is many, many hours spent on azlyrics.com, collectively losing our minds. If anyone has a tool that can sort songs by meaning, please send it our way, because we were manually sifting through entire artist discographies. Huge credit has to go to my coauthor Addie, who agreed to join me on this fool's errand after seeing the madness that was my partially filled out construction spreadsheet - however deranged that I may seem now, know that I would have been much worse without her working tirelessly with me. I also want to thank Olga, who isn't listed as an author on this puzzle but who provided invaluable help in going through our lyric connections and flagging all the ones that were a little too dubious to work outside of our own heads. There's a lot of risk with a puzzle mechanic as subjective as this one, and testsolving feedback was the only way that we got it to work as well as it does.

Of course, what helped with constructing this puzzle is the fact that Addie and I are both big fans of folk music in general. We were definitely doing some finagling of the data to try and fit in our favorite bands. Out of the musical groups in this puzzle, I can highly recommend the following: The Oh Hellos (particularly their 4 Winds album cycle), the Arcadian Wild, Simon & Garfunkel, The Crane Wives, The Amazing Devil, AURORA, Fleet Foxes, The Lumineers, and Mumford and Sons. I will also shout out Of Monsters and Men as a favorite band that I was unfortunately unable to fit into this puzzle.

At the end of the day, I am honestly astonished that we managed to get this puzzle working. There were many points at which I thought we were going to need to throw the whole thing out and start from scratch, but somehow it pulled through - and of that I'm very pleased. Possibly no one else will be quite as tickled by the combination of the datasets as I was, but I hope there are at least a few solvers that come away from this puzzle with a new appreciation for folk music, Peter Bruegel the Elder, or both.

Adeline: Despite what Ella seems to suggest, it required basically zero effort to convince to me join up—I saw the puzzle title in our master planning sheet, went, "Oh, a folk song puzzle?", and immediately offered myself for whatever help might be needed.

I was immediately sold on the core puzzle mechanic (the linking of song lyrics to proverb meanings), but as it turns out, this kind of thing is hard to make unambiguous in a puzzle context. Something Ella didn't mention is that our early drafts involved solvers finding the groupings themselves (the songs were presented as an alpha-ordered list of 36)—and while I and my terminal literary-analysis-brain agreed this should be possible, it turns out such fickle things as meanings are "subjective" and "open to the listener's interpretation". Who would have thought?

In terms of folk artists that I recommend, I have pretty much the same list as Ella: I came into this puzzle knowing (and loving) The Amazing Devil, The Oh Hellos, The Arcadian Wild, and The Crane Wives, and The Longest Johns; I came out with basically half the artists on our final list. I did try for ages to fit "Puff, the Magic Dragon" (by Peter, Paul, and Mary) into the puzzle, but was unfortunately stymied by the lack of relevant proverbs in good locations. Nevertheless, I recommend them too.