Given today's dystopian political environment, I can hardly be blamed for looking back to a simpler time when America actually was, not only pretty great, but beloved across the world. (Well, except for Germany and Japan.) In terms of technique and content, this album's a bit of a departure. Instead of digging up old lyrics of my mom's and arranging them as pop tunes (well, okay, I did do one of those here), I invented an alternate Earth—one where I had been born in 1873, and was still alive in 1943, leading a big band on a USO tour instead of showing up decades later as a Boomer with a laptop.

1943 sat squarely in the middle of a war that already felt endless. The year began with the losses at Stalingrad still being counted and ended with the first Allied steps onto the Italian mainland. In between, millions of people worked themselves to the bone without any certainty that their efforts would change the outcome. That is a hard year to write songs for and so a more interesting one, because the humor of the time has to be funny without being reassuring. Nobody on this album knows how it turns out.

So the comedy runs closer to the bone. There is a man whose Jeep loses its steering wheel and who gets decorated for the result, borrowed in outline from William Cowper's 1782 poem about a runaway horse. There is a radio intercept operator who saves a company of men and gets nothing for it but the last verse of her own song. There is a poem my mother wrote and got into the local paper, which I memorized as a boy and have been waiting most of my life to set to music. And there is a good deal of ordinary silliness, because that is what a band is for when the news is bad.

It's also a bit of an experiment in voice—writing as someone who lived through it, rather than someone looking back on it—and in production, leaning on Suno to get the period big-band sound right. All lyrics are mine (I admit to occasional rhyming help), and the arrangements are based on my melodies.

For the record, these sessions are dated June 1943, and each track's page tells a little of what was in the news that month.

You can listen to the whole album here, or visit each track listed below to read the lyrics and play that song only.

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Cuttin' A Rug (With My Jitterbug)

By: Paul S Cilwa	Posted: 10/1/2026		Page Views: 13
Hashtags: #Music #1940s #BigBand
A USO jitterbug in a mouthful of 1943 slang—zoot suit included, the same month the zoot suit started a riot.
Estimated reading time: 3 minute(s) (612 words)

This is a dance-floor love song told almost entirely in 1943 slang, and the fun of it is how much of that slang fits into two minutes. To flip your wig is to lose your composure; to be hep to the jive is to be in the know; hubba-hubba is what a serviceman said when a pretty girl walked by; and cuttin' a rug is dancing hard enough to wear out the carpet. A jitterbug is both the dance and the dancer—anybody doing the fast, acrobatic swing that the Lindy Hop had turned into by the war years.

Coils

By: Paul S Cilwa	Posted: 10/1/2026		Page Views: 12
Hashtags: #Music
An instrumental for June 1943, when Allied bombers pounded an Italian island fortress into surrender.
Estimated reading time: 1 minute(s) (219 words)

“Coils” is one of the band's instrumentals, so in place of lyrics, here is what was in the news the month it was recorded—an operation whose Allied code name was, fittingly, Corkscrew.

Little Miss Muffet

By: Paul S Cilwa	Posted: 10/1/2026		Page Views: 22
Hashtags: #Music #1940s #BigBand #WAC #Signals
The tuffet is a swivel chair, and the spider waits until the last line.
Estimated reading time: 3 minute(s) (702 words)

We played a good many rooms this year where half the uniforms in the hall belonged to women, and it got harder and harder to walk offstage having sung only about the boys. So here is a nursery rhyme with a headset on. The tuffet is a swivel chair, the curds and whey never come up at all, and the spider has to wait till the very last line for his entrance.

Bellwether Weather

By: Paul S Cilwa	Posted: 10/1/2026		Page Views: 12
Hashtags: #Music
An instrumental for the hot summer of 1943, when the weather in America's crowded war cities turned violent.
Estimated reading time: 2 minute(s) (245 words)

A bellwether is the sheep with the bell, the one the flock follows, and the summer of 1943 turned out to be a bellwether of its own. The heat came early; the war plants had packed the cities with newcomers competing for the same housing and the same jobs; and in June the tension broke in one city after another—the Zoot Suit Riots in Los Angeles in the first week, a riot in Beaumont, Texas, in the middle of the month, and then the worst of them, in Detroit.

Pa and the Camera

By: Paul S Cilwa	Posted: 9/26/2026		Page Views: 20
Hashtags: #Music
A backwoods family gets their 'pitcher' taken.
Estimated reading time: 3 minute(s) (486 words)

My Mom, Edna Mae Brown, wrote this humorous poem back in the day when that was enough to get one into the local newspaper. I actually memorized this poem and recited it my high school, and some years later, it came in handy when I was M.C.-ing a kids' dance recital and an unexpected delay required me to fill in the time. Anyway, it's way past time it got set to music.

How Can I Make Him Love Me?

By: Paul S Cilwa	Posted: 10/1/2026		Page Views: 14
Hashtags: #Music #1940s #BigBand
A jumping dance number that will get you out of your seat!
Estimated reading time: 1 minute(s) (201 words)

In the real world this rock song is my signature tune. But when I needed a high energy dance number for my 1940s big band, I looked ahead in time for this inspiration. Swing xylophone, anyone?

Colonel John Gilpin

By: Paul S Cilwa	Posted: 10/1/2026		Page Views: 25
Hashtags: #Music #1940s #BigBand #ComicSong
Cowper's runaway horse, re-enlisted as a Jeep with no steering wheel.
Estimated reading time: 4 minute(s) (749 words)

Somebody in the brass section had a school copy of Cowper, and by the second week of the tour the whole bus could recite the runaway-horse business at the least provocation. The Diverting History of John Gilpin is from 1782 and concerns a London linen-draper whose borrowed horse bolts, takes his hat and his wig with it, and carries him thirteen miles past the dinner he was going to. We kept the predicament and we kept the refrain. Everything else here is ours.

Reflective Path

By: Paul S Cilwa	Posted: 10/1/2026		Page Views: 14
Hashtags: #1940s #BigBand #LindyHop #Music
A hot jump tune for a Lindy Hop on a path of broken colored glass—and for June 30, 1943, when the Pacific war took its first big jump toward Rabaul.
Estimated reading time: 1 minute(s) (182 words)

Don't let the title fool you: this one is a hot jump tune, built for the Lindy Hop. The path I had in mind is one of those Eastern-style garden walks paved with broken colored glass, the kind that catches the sunlight and throws it back in dancing patterns of red and blue and gold. Put a couple of Lindy Hoppers on it, and let the light chase their feet.

Dancing Through The Sky

By: Paul S Cilwa	Posted: 10/1/2026		Page Views: 13
Hashtags: #Music
A night on the town under a sky dark enough to see the stars—because the lights along the coast were still dimmed for the war.
Estimated reading time: 2 minute(s) (425 words)

A night-out song: the winter's over, the blues are left out on the sidewalk, and a couple swings its way down the boulevard and onto the dance floor, with the band echoing every line back at them. The chorus is the heart of it—lift your head, no more shadows, and watch the stars go dancing through the sky.

Busy Bee Rag

By: Paul S Cilwa	Posted: 10/1/2026		Page Views: 14
Hashtags: #Music
A short, busy instrumental for June 1943, when Congress put every paycheck to work: income tax withholding.
Estimated reading time: 1 minute(s) (201 words)

At a minute and a quarter, the Busy Bee Rag barely has time to land. It goes with a busy piece of June news that Americans are still living with: on June 9, 1943, President Roosevelt signed the Current Tax Payment Act, and starting July 1 employers withheld 20 percent of wages for the income tax.

Mama's Back (From Yokohama)

By: Paul S Cilwa	Posted: 10/1/2026		Page Views: 48
Hashtags: #Music #1940s #USO #BigBand
The war's not over yet—but this one gets there early, just to see.
Estimated reading time: 3 minute(s) (546 words)

Strictly speaking, this one gets ahead of the news. In 1943 nobody stateside was hopping a boat to Japan and back for a weekend, but we wrote it anyway, imagining the day some hometown mother makes the trip herself, sees the peace settled with her own eyes, and comes home to report on it personally—less a piece of reporting than a piece of wishful thinking set to a beat, the same kind of hope that runs through half this album.

Chopin's Dead

By: Paul S Cilwa	Posted: 10/1/2026		Page Views: 12
Hashtags: #Music #1940s #BigBand
An instrumental for June 1943, in an occupied Poland where Chopin was banned and the underground army lost its commander.
Estimated reading time: 1 minute(s) (207 words)

Chopin is dead, all right, and in 1943 the Germans were doing their best to keep him that way. In occupied Poland, Poles were forbidden to perform his music from the first year of the occupation, and his statue in Warsaw's Łazienki Park had been blown up on May 31, 1940—the first monument in the city the Germans destroyed—and its bronze cut up and melted down. People played him anyway, at secret concerts in private apartments.

We Can Only Hope

By: Paul S Cilwa	Posted: 10/1/2026		Page Views: 12
Hashtags: #Music
A campy duet for the end of the world, in which the pigeons really were drafted.
Estimated reading time: 3 minute(s) (510 words)

A duet for the end of the world, sung by two people who have decided to be charming about it. The baritone opens with the news—the world is trembling, the future's looking thin, tomorrow might be canceled before the morning can begin—and then undercuts it: if the sky falls at midnight, at least you're looking fine. The soprano pushes it further into camp, and the bridge states the whole philosophy of the thing: if disaster comes, pin a flower to its lapel and kindly usher it in.

The Eagle Flies for Freedom

By: Paul S Cilwa	Posted: 9/24/2026		Page Views: 27
Hashtags: #Music #1940s #BigBand
The whole home front, seen from the one height where it looks like one country.
Estimated reading time: 3 minute(s) (615 words)

This is the number we close on, and it takes the long way home. It goes up over the western mountains and the ranch country, down across the factory towns, east toward the man across the water, and back again over a schoolyard—the whole country from the one height at which it looks like one thing. Nobody on the ground gets that view. That is what the eagle is for.