At 75, I've been going through decades of memorabilia so my kids won't someday have to, and in the process I came upon a trove of old songs and poems that had either never been recorded, or existed only as demo tapes I'd made on cassette tape (ask a Boomer).

In this album I decided to include all the songs I wrote from before my first marriage to the end of my second marriage, a span of about 40 years. Some songs are serious; some are my silly observations of pop culture as manifested by the various eras through which I've lived. I tried to alternate the serious and the silly. I'm the songwriter, lyricist, and composer—same as always—but this time around I made use of modern AI tools to produce the recordings, the same way I once leaned on MIDI, Cakewalk, and a computer to record my 1997 first album.

I'm very pleased with how these turned out. I hope you enjoy them!

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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Music Only Dogs Can Hear

By: Paul S Cilwa	Posted: 8/23/2026		Page Views: 346
Hashtags: #Music
The title song: what dogs hear that we can't—and what we won't.
Estimated reading time: 3 minute(s) (496 words)

This song exists because the album needed it to. It is, for that reason, the newest song on the album, and the only one written after 1976. I'd had the album title for a good while before I realize there was no song by that name on the record!—so the album was very nearly finished before its own title track got written.

When I Was A Computer Lad

By: Paul S Cilwa	Posted: 8/14/2026		Page Views: 98
Hashtags: #Music
Gilbert and Sullivan, by way of Allan Sherman, by way of COBOL.
Estimated reading time: 2 minute(s) (431 words)

The tune goes back to Gilbert & Sullivan's H.M.S. Pinafore, where Sir Joseph Porter sings "When I Was a Lad" to explain how he rose to become First Lord of the Admiralty without ever setting foot on a ship. The 1960s comic Allan Sherman later parodied it—his version follows a guy climbing the ranks in advertising. So I decided to write my own parody, about becoming a computer programmer. Sherman's arrangement was jazzy, a cappella except for drums; for mine, I went Big Band.

The Fly and I

By: Paul S Cilwa	Posted: 10/23/2023 Updated: 8/15/2026		Page Views: 50
Hashtags: #Music
A fight to the finish.
Estimated reading time: 2 minute(s) (377 words)

A fight to the finish.

The Heart Remembers

By: Paul S Cilwa	Posted: 8/22/2026		Page Views: 240
Hashtags: #Music
Mom's poem about forgetting everything except the one thing that matters.
Estimated reading time: 3 minute(s) (479 words)

Another of my mother's poems set to music. Edna Mae Brown-Cilwa was a published poet, and this one is collected with the rest of her work here.

Where Freedom Finds Its Song

By: Paul S Cilwa	Posted: 8/19/2026		Page Views: 46
Hashtags: #Music
The same song as on 1944, in a completely different century.
Estimated reading time: 1 minute(s) (56 words)

This song appears on two of my albums, in two very different outfits. The version on 1944 is big band, written for a wartime USO stage. This one is modern pop—same words, same melody, a completely different century.