Thank you AudioTrack, Joseph Land, rharv, Rustyspoon and Mike Halloran! And of course, Google, where I wasted hours to find inaccurate and outdated info galore!

I've learned a lot more about this topic than I ever wanted to know! (And a lot of it was remembering what I had learned 20 years ago and forgotten!)

- the audio CD standard was not designed to have embedded metadata in the same way we embed it into mp3s
- WAV files do not seem to reliably accept/retain metadata
- there are a TON of metadata tags you can use once you know about them
- these can be embedded using certain types of software
- Windows File Explorer handles metadata inconsistently and I'd say very poorly
- you can embed metadata in one program and then it won't show up in another program
- Windows takes Publisher and shows it as Producers
- there is something called CD-Text that can record some metadata
- BUT, after your best efforts, there are CD players out there that will ignore your meticulously crafted metadata

So, below is what I ended up doing for my songs,

- decided ALL of my songs will be rendered as FLAC since 1) it is lossless, 2) it has smaller filesizes and 3) it supports metadata
- used MP3Tag to add all of the metadata I want. It is super powerful allowing you to add a ton of metadata fields that simply don't appear in other tools I was using before. I even added embedded lyrics in each of my songs!
- I used the free burnaware to allow me to add metadata for the album via CD-Text
- now I have this set of songs on an audio CD that will display metadata if the CD player handles it
- and I have a set of files I can submit to Bandcamp as FLAC that will have metadata so anyone who downloads them should be able to access that metadata

Thanks to everyone for the advice!