Music Cryptogram Puzzles — 15 to Decode

The music collection is the fastest one here. It mixes lines musicians sang with things they said off stage — Lennon, Dylan, Muddy Waters, Hendrix, Zappa, Cobain — and almost all of them are short, plain-spoken and pitched at somebody in particular. They were built to be caught on first hearing, which is a very different job from a philosopher's sentence.

That makes for an odd, enjoyable kind of solve. Swapping every letter for a number leaves you with a small board and not much frequency data, so the statistics that carry you through a longer quote are barely there. What replaces them is recognition. Hooks repeat inside themselves, second-person words (you, your, don't) turn up again and again, and there is a moment two or three letters in when you stop decoding and simply hear the rest of the line — then fill it in faster than you can read it.

Good for a couple of minutes between other things, and a fair warning: several of these will be stuck in your head for the remainder of the afternoon.