I Can See Clearly Now

Nice one. I loved the way you used the song!

Cool. I was thinking we should remove the letters RAIN from the grid and see what was left. Took a while to reverse that. Fun! Thank you.

Well done! I needed the hint, since I fell into the trap you set by pretending it was about eyecare. Someday I'll learn.

Finally got it -- just had to keep poking at it. Stumbled onto the RAIN thing fairly quickly due to the lyric in the title, but took me foreeevvvver to find BAHRAIN and GERAINT (that one, I had to backsolve for). Nice puzzle, Rick! Way to being the new year.

Thanks, Cap'n - it took me some time to see it, but a lot of fun throughout the process. Definitely a good "aha" when what I needed to do clicked, and then a merry chase to the solve

Wow, great, and very difficult puzzle. Early on I thought, "hey that is the start to a song, I'll bet...", but I was trying to remove the letters RAIN either where they appeared together or in total - BIG mess. Then I got caught with trying to add to the end or beginning as I "usually" do with a Cap'n; nice changeup. I should have suspected with some of the odd answers. Actually I did with NAURU and that was the one that finally helped me. I saw it doing a nudge request and then Meg confirmed that I was on the right track but not to get locked into a simple addition. You know, when I saw BARS clued musically with this group a flare should have gone up, and ENID...well you might see an archaic reference like that in a DrTom, but never a Cap. Excellent use of the words Cap, and what a way to start the year!

I was another one who was removing the letters of RAIN from the grid. For a good number of entries, this left only one letter (or that one letter repeated, as in LIARLIAR). FWIW, I thought the answer to THAT meta was getting a little bit close to sunglasses (though of course it never was going to have an A, with RAIN removed… ). This was really fun to figure out once someone corrected my method! I even grokked GERAINT thinking that sounded like something from an old epic (it rang a bell)… though maybe I was thinking of Gawain. ANYhoo… kudos on a great first puzzle of 2024.

Didn’t see BahRAIN or GeRAINt but figured “BAMIG” was missing something lol. Definitely Beaming now I’ve seen the full metanism! Thanks Cap’n!

Wow -- a toughie! I needed that flashback nudge! I was glad that Geraint rang a distant bell for me too, Headin', and that the whole puzzle didn't turn out to be in Olde English or something! :-) Thanks for the challenge, Cap'n!

I just know that if I asked Rick - why in the world would you pick an obscure Knight of the Round table as part of a meta, was that somehting that had to happen, he would answer (and my sincerest apologies to Ira Gershwin):

Geraint, necessarily so

Geraint, necessarily so

The things that are better

You'll find in a meta

Geraint, necessarily so

Tough one for me. I needed the first Wed. nudge to get me to think of the song lyrics. Nice challenge to start the year. Thanks, Rick.

I thought of the song immediately. I couldn't find where to take away rain and then I tried adding it to the beginning of grid words which, of course, didnt work. Finally caught on after a muggle nudge. Good one, Cap'n.

Woofh.... evidence indicates I got "the one that got away" (although I have no memory of it) so I should have been able to get this. But I didn't.

Not sure how to backsolve the E and N and ... or I'll just read the other comments.

Beaming now, but spent yesterday/today red as a beet, dry as a bone, blind as a bat, mad as a hatter, hot as a hare, full as a flask. That's what a great meta (and anticholinergic toxicity) will do to ya! Thanks for the nudges and SOS Cap'n. You just keep getting better and better!

Beautiful!! Needed the nudges to see clearly

Excellent puzzle, lousy solver. Even when I got the idea that RAIN had to be brought back in, I at first thought it would be at the beginning of end of the entries. I think there actually is something called a "rain table."

finally got it, very cool, thank you!

knew the song thanks to claritin commercials... had BAMIG for the longest time... figured the E had to be esme or enid so spent awhile googling salinger characters and idylls of the king characters until i got it... thank goodness for ctrl+F... thanks for the puzzle cap'n