Randall Michael Tobin: Burbank Baker With a Musical Past

Randall Michael Tobin built the counter at his Burbank bakery himself. The skills came from junior high school shop class, learned roughly fifty years ago and still in daily use. That detail tells you almost everything about how he operates.

The bakery is small, tucked into a Burbank storefront that smells like toasted crust and warm butter. Loaves line up in neat rows while customers deliberate. Behind the oven, a timer beeps and Tobin steps away to tend to dough that has been moving through a slow, three-day process toward becoming bread. His life has a way of converging in this room: music, electronics, graphic design, a commitment to health, and a genuine drive to make people happy through what he bakes.

Tobin was born in Burbank and spent his earliest years close to where the bakery now stands. He attended Thomas Jefferson Elementary on the northwest side before his family relocated to Baldwin Hills. At his new school, he ended up in the same orbit as another kid who loved performing: Danny Elfman. They were in the same grade, lived close enough to hang out, and jammed together. At Audubon Junior High, their paths quietly diverged. Elfman moved toward drama and school plays. Tobin gravitated toward orchestra and industrial arts.

Junior high turned out to be the shaping chapter. The school ran an industrial arts program that offered woodshop, metal shop, drafting, print shop, plastics, and leatherwork. Tobin worked through all of it.

“Each of those classes that I took, I actually learned skills that I still use today,” he says.

The wooden counter in the bakery traces back to woodshop. The design sensibility behind his packaging comes partly from print shop, where he learned to set type by hand, placing tiny metal letters by feel and sliding literal strips of lead between lines of type to control spacing. That physical process taught him what “leading” actually meant, not as a software setting but as material reality. When the industry shifted to computers, the terminology was already familiar.

“When I saw type on a screen, I knew where everything came from,” he says. “I knew what you meant by ‘leading’ because I used to put the lead in there.”

High school held less appeal. Photography was the one class he genuinely enjoyed. He marched with the band as a walk-on drummer and dabbled in electronics, but mostly he wanted out. College felt like the wrong road. His mother pointed him toward an Air Force recruiter instead. His older sister had enlisted the year before and was doing well. For Tobin, staying home felt like standing still.

The Air Force gave him electronics training and a structured path forward, building on the hands-on curiosity he had developed at Audubon. That thread, the willingness to learn a physical skill thoroughly and apply it in unexpected places, runs through every phase of his life.

The bakery is the current expression of that approach. Tobin brings the same methodical attention to bread that he once applied to circuit boards and typeset newsletters. The three-day dough process is not a selling point he throws into marketing copy. It is simply how he believes bread should be made.

Burbank keeps coming up in his story in the way it tends to for people who grew up here. The city is small enough that a childhood connection to a schoolmate and future film composer feels less like a celebrity footnote and more like a neighborhood memory. Tobin does not trade on that history. It surfaces the way most formative things do, as context, not currency.

What defines him now is the counter, the loaves, and the timer that keeps pulling him back to the dough. He built the space and the rhythms of it the same way he learned to build most things: by starting with the fundamentals, staying with the process, and not rushing what needs time to develop.