Recently, I've gone somewhere, done something, or seen something amazing I've shared in these pages. Here, you'll find my most recent posts, covering a wide range of topics that pique my interest. Whether you're passionate about travel, captivated by photography, enchanted by music, or intrigued by computer programming, there's likely to be something here for everyone!

Dive in and explore the latest insights, stories, and adventures that I have to share. Enjoy your stay!

Busy Bee Rag

By: Paul S Cilwa	Posted: 10/1/2026		Page Views: 13
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.

Magic In Your Eyes

By: Paul S Cilwa	Posted: 10/1/2026		Page Views: 8
Hashtags: #Music
My poem meets America (the band, not the country)..
Estimated reading time: 1 minute(s) (207 words)

My poem meets America (the band, not the country).

1944

By: Paul S Cilwa	Posted: 10/1/2026		Page Views: 161
Hashtags: #Music
The companion to 1944, one year earlier—back when nobody yet knew how it ended.

This is the second dispatch from the alternate Earth I built for "1944"—the one where I was born forty years early and spent the war leading a big band around USO stages instead of turning up decades later as a Boomer with a laptop. Same bandleader, same company of singers, one year further back. I went backwards on purpose.

We Can Only Hope

By: Paul S Cilwa	Posted: 10/1/2026		Page Views: 11
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.

Mama's Back (From Yokohama)

By: Paul S Cilwa	Posted: 10/1/2026		Page Views: 47
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.

Dancing Through The Sky

By: Paul S Cilwa	Posted: 10/1/2026		Page Views: 12
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.

Reflective Path

By: Paul S Cilwa	Posted: 10/1/2026		Page Views: 13
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.

Colonel John Gilpin

By: Paul S Cilwa	Posted: 10/1/2026		Page Views: 24
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.

How Can I Make Him Love Me?

By: Paul S Cilwa	Posted: 10/1/2026		Page Views: 13
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?

Bellwether Weather

By: Paul S Cilwa	Posted: 10/1/2026		Page Views: 11
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.

Little Miss Muffet

By: Paul S Cilwa	Posted: 10/1/2026		Page Views: 21
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.

Coils

By: Paul S Cilwa	Posted: 10/1/2026		Page Views: 11
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.

Cuttin' A Rug (With My Jitterbug)

By: Paul S Cilwa	Posted: 10/1/2026		Page Views: 12
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.

An Even Greater Love

By: Paul S Cilwa	Posted: 10/1/2026		Page Views: 200
Hashtags: #Music
A track from the album, Music Only Dogs Can Hear.
Estimated reading time: 2 minute(s) (282 words)

Remember Whitney Houston's The Greatest Love of All? Well…not to be outdone, I decided to write a song that was even greater than that one.

Music Only Dogs Can Hear

By: Paul S Cilwa	Posted: 10/1/2026		Page Views: 154
Hashtags: #Music
Decades-old lyrics from the bottom of a memorabilia box, given brand-new AI-assisted recordings.

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.

That Time We Moved To Vermont

By: Paul S Cilwa	Occurred: 7/1/1958 Updated: 10/1/2026	Milestone: #Residence	Page Views: 10,029
Hashtags: #Vermont #Victory #Autobiography
Rural life in the 1950s.
Estimated reading time: 29 minute(s) (6767 words)

My folks waited until school was out for the summer, then packed us into the Studebaker, and headed North to a century-old house in Victory, Vermont. At 7, I had no idea where Vermont was or even what it was, much less why we were going. All questions were answered with, "You'll see."

Strange Fruit

By: Paul S Cilwa	Posted: 10/1/2026		Page Views: 11
Hashtags: #Music
The big-band arrangement, recorded for the 1943 album.
Estimated reading time: 1 minute(s) (20 words)

TODO: a note about this track.

Chopin's Dead

By: Paul S Cilwa	Posted: 10/1/2026		Page Views: 11
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.