2012 Construction Contest

Find theme entries for a crossword meeting the following constraints:

• Each theme entry is a reasonably well-known song title.
• The lengths of the theme entries are symmetric (e.g. 15, 13, 13, 15 or 11, 7, 9, 7, 11).
• Chaining together the first words of each song creates an opening line for another song.
• The first word of each song is *not* in the song title.

For example,

BROWN EYED GIRL   (“Hey where did we go…”)
LANDSLIDE   (“I took my love…)
MAGGIE MAY   (“Wake up Maggie…”)
KING OF THE ROAD (“Trailer for sale or rent…”)

have acceptable lengths of 13, 9, 9, and 13.  But since there’s no song with the opening lyric “Hey I Wake Trailer,”  this quartet wouldn’t work.

Judging criteria:

• The more theme entries, the better.  They don’t necessarily have to all fit in a 15x grid – larger grids are ok.
• The more well-known the songs are, the better.
• It has to be the very first word of the song. “Ohs” and the like count.
• If the opening lyric is related to starting things, that’s pretty sweet. For example, finding eight songs that give you Elvis Costello’s “Oh I just don’t know where to begin” would be pretty great.
• Ideally the opening lyric words are in the order of the theme entries, as in “Hey I Wake Trailer” above. Out-of-order words (e.g. “I Wake Trailer Hey” for the example above) will be considered, albeit with some demerits for inelegance.