RECORDED SONGS FROM THE TOASTER 

Q: “In a Minute” opens on a deeply intimate note. What is the history of that song, and how did it change once you got into the studio?
David Kitzmiller: "'In a Minute' actually started with a very ordinary moment. Early in my relationship with my second wife, I was sitting at the computer writing the poem that eventually became the song. She asked me to come to bed, and I said, “In a minute.” She said, “No.” That became a running line between us in those early days. If one of us needed a little more time, the other would sometimes answer with that same blunt “no,” and we’d laugh. But underneath that joke was something I was trying to capture in the poem—the feeling that those early moments with someone you love can seem so brief and almost dreamlike that you want to stop time. You want just another minute to look at them, touch them, breathe, and really be there. The original poem keeps returning to that idea, gradually stretching the minute into hours, days, years, and eventually forever.

When we got into the studio, the song began to take on a life beyond the original poem. The arrangement changed the way I heard the words, and Tim’s vocal brought a kind of emotional weight to them that I hadn't completely anticipated. James Fields described what he was hearing as having the sweeping intimacy of a wedding first dance, and I understood what he meant. The song stopped being just about wanting another minute with one particular person and became more about what a minute can contain when you’re completely in love with someone. The chorus takes that simple request—“Can I have a minute?”—and keeps extending it: the minute after that, the hours that follow, and eventually the desire to spend a lifetime together.

I think that was the biggest change in the studio. What began as a private phrase between two people became something much larger without losing that original intimacy. It’s still asking for a minute, but by the end, the real request is for a lifetime. That’s one of the things I love about recording old poems: sometimes the music finds something in them that I didn’t know was there when I wrote them."

Q: “Second Place, Second Rate” carries an incredibly heavy emotional weight. How did the band approach recording something that emotionally charged?
David Kitzmiller: "'Second Place, Second Rate' had been haunting me for years before I ever recorded it. It came out of a relationship with someone I refer to as the 'Rich Girl' in my book A Step Away from Bathing with a Toaster. I wrote about that relationship more than once, and several of those poems eventually became songs. There was something about that particular situation that I couldn’t seem to let go of. I was in love with someone who, emotionally, still belonged to someone else. She could be right there with me and still be somewhere else in her head, living inside the memory of another relationship. The poem is really about the humiliation and helplessness of realizing that love isn’t necessarily enough to make someone choose you.

When we recorded it, something happened that told me the song belonged on the album. We got it in one take. When the last note finished, everyone in the room seemed to let out the same uncomfortable sigh. It was one of those moments where nobody had to say, 'That was good.' We all knew we had just captured something that was almost too right. The revised version also brought out more of the complicated side of the story — the fact that I wasn’t simply angry at her or at the man she couldn’t let go of. I was watching someone deliberately reopen her own wound through nostalgia while I was trying to convince myself that I could somehow compete with a memory.

That’s ultimately how it found its place on the album. I think every album has a song that becomes part of its emotional center, and this was that song for me. The wound behind it never really had a neat resolution, and maybe that’s why the song has such weight. There’s even a point where I admit that I want her to love me the way she loved him. That’s not a particularly flattering thing to admit, but it’s honest. Recording the song didn’t fix any of that. It gave the feeling a voice, and once I heard it in the room, I knew it had to be part of the record."

Q: The title “86 Reasons Not to Love” sounds like a literal checklist. Is there actually a count, and how did the sonic arrangement evolve from your original concept?
David Kitzmiller: "The title sounds like I sat down and carefully counted out 86 reasons not to love, but I didn’t. I learned pretty early that if you want a story to feel believable, specifics matter, so there needed to be a specific number. Eighty‑six just felt right. The poem started as an attempt to write myself out of wanting love — to build an airtight case for why love was complicated, painful, destructive, and ultimately not worth the trouble. Instead, the list became increasingly chaotic. Some of the reasons are bitter, some are tragic, some are absurd, and then there’s 'Love farts,' which is there partly because at some point the whole argument had become ridiculous. The original poem keeps piling things on until it finally admits the problem with the entire exercise: 'Love is nothing / Without someone to love.'

The arrangement went through a similar process of figuring out what the song actually wanted to be. My first instinct was a very sparse piano arrangement, but it didn’t quite work. When we stripped it down to guitar, the words had much more room to breathe, and that seemed right for a song that is essentially one long, increasingly unhinged argument with itself. We also shaped the delivery around some of the individual lines. 'Love farts,' for example, is spoken rather than sung, with a dry, almost bitter laugh.

What I like about the finished version is that it never completely resolves the contradiction. I’m trying to make the case against love while simultaneously revealing that I’m still hopelessly in love with the idea of loving someone. The 86 reasons are really a way of talking myself into something I don't actually believe. And by the end, the song gives me away: after everything love has supposedly done, I still arrive at the conclusion that love is nothing without someone to love."

Q: “Pharmaceutical Grade” tackles a very honest look at the intersection of mental health, addiction history, and aging. Where did that track spark from?
David Kitzmiller: "It started during another round of mental-health treatment, when I was prescribed antidepressants again. There was hope in that, obviously — I wanted to feel better — but there was also a fear that came with it. I’ve spent a lot of my life turning sadness, depression, and difficult experiences into something creative. So I started wondering what would happen if the medication took away some of those edges. Would I still want to write? Would the words come the same way? Would I lose some part of myself that I had come to associate with making art? The original poem came directly out of that tension: pills stacked on pills, the hope that they might help, and the fear that they might make pieces of my mind go numb.

There’s also a history underneath it. I had taken pills in the past for very different reasons, and the medications I was being prescribed now were obviously not the same thing, but there was something psychologically familiar about the cycle — the bottles, the routines, the idea that there was a pill for whatever was wrong. As I’ve gotten older, there are simply more prescriptions and more things to manage, and that made the contrast even harder to ignore. In the revised song, that became 'White paper, legal names. / Prescribed salvation — / Same cycle, same chain.'

The part that still bothers me is that I’m not really afraid of getting better. I’m afraid of what 'better' might cost me. The song asks that pretty directly: 'Scared to swallow hope, / Scared to trust the fade.' I don’t think the song is arguing that medication is bad. It’s about the much more personal fear of whether I can become more stable without losing the part of myself that wants to turn all of this into words."

Q: “Blue” stands out as a unique collaboration on the record. How did it end up becoming the bonus track that closes out the album?
David Kitzmiller: "‘Blue' wasn’t supposed to be on the album at all. I thought I had finished the record at ten tracks. We were listening back to 'In a Minute' when Tim’s wife came into the studio and sat down with us. Because she was hearing everything for the first time, I found myself watching her reactions — she teared up at 'In a Minute', laughed at some of the moments in '86 Reasons Not to Love,' and was really engaged with the different kinds of writing. During the break, we started talking about the songs and about the possibility of writing something specifically for a female voice. She asked if I had anything like that.

I had an unfinished poem sitting around that immediately came to mind. Some of the writing had been influenced by Hope Sandoval, and for whatever reason, seeing Tim's wife in the studio and hearing the way I imagined that poem being delivered made the connection happen. I went back to it, and within about twenty minutes 'Blue' had started to take shape. The original poem was very sparse — 'My light / My blue light' — and the finished song developed into something more intimate and atmospheric, with lines like 'Wrap me in your shadow, / Hold me in your light' and 'Sleep with me tonight.'

By the next session, I had it fully worked out for her to record. It was a strange way for a song to arrive because it didn't really belong on the album when we started, but once it existed, it belonged there. It became the bonus track that closes the record almost by accident. I think that’s fitting, because 'Blue' came from being open to what happened in the room rather than trying to force the album to follow a plan. The right voice made me hear an unfinished poem differently, and suddenly there was a song that hadn’t been there before."

Q: “Carsick” opens Volume II on an intense, unsettling note. What is the emotional timeline behind this track, and how did it change during recording?

David Kitzmiller: "'Carsick' began as an almost throwaway moment. I was standing in the corner of a crowded room, feeling completely alone, and trying to understand this new feeling I was having for someone. The poem was really me arguing with myself: I didn’t trust love, I had been in love before and watched it turn into pain, and now I was feeling something that was keeping me awake and making me physically react whenever this person was near. I kept telling myself, “'t can’t be love,' because I didn’t want it to be. But what gives that little poem so much more weight to me now is that it was the last thing I wrote before my brother Norman passed away. I obviously didn’t know that when I wrote it. Looking back, it feels like the last time I was able to look at love with what I would call unscarred eyes. The relationship that inspired it didn’t survive everything that came afterward, but the poem did.

When I turned it into a song, it became almost the opposite of that quiet uncertainty. The poem is mostly someone thinking in circles; the recording became restless, loud, and almost physically uncomfortable. The guitars and distortion gave the song that unsettled feeling, and the repeated 'It can’t be love' became much more confrontational. Even the bridge changed the way I heard the character in the song—'You got me sick / You got me wired,' followed by 'I’ve got my hand out / Don’t know what I’m reaching for.' It sounds like someone who is overwhelmed by what he’s feeling and doesn’t know whether to run from it or reach for it.

And then the ending gives away what the whole song has been fighting against: 'It can’t be love… / But maybe it is.' That’s really what 'Carsick' became for me. It started as a small moment of uncertainty, became a much bigger and more volatile song in the studio, and then, because of what happened in my life afterward, became a kind of marker for the last time I remember approaching love without all the scars I would eventually carry. There’s something bittersweet about that. The song is about being afraid to feel something, but the fact that I wrote it at all reminds me that I was still capable of feeling it."

Q: “Dead End” touches on a recurring seasonal struggle and references a very specific figure in your past. Can you talk about the cycle that inspired it?
David Kitzmiller: "'“Dead End” comes from a pattern I’ve recognized in myself for a long time. When winter approaches, something in me starts shutting down. I eventually understood where some of that came from while I was writing Born with a Toaster in the Bathroom: winter meant being trapped inside when I was younger, and being trapped inside meant being exposed to more abuse. That association got wired into me early, so even years later, the change of seasons could trigger something I didn’t always know how to control. The  poem is pretty blunt about that cycle—'Winter approaches / I will shut down soon / It happens / Every fucking year.'

The specific moment that brought the song back to me happened while I was driving on I-465 and “Jaded” came on the radio. Suddenly I was thinking about the Singer with Red Hair and remembering that relationship differently. She hadn’t done anything wrong. In fact, the poem says that directly: 'It wasn’t your fault / That last fight.' But I was already shutting down, and it was easier for me to walk away than to explain what was happening inside me. That memory stayed with me, including the fact that I still have her band’s T-shirt. It’s a strange little physical reminder of someone and of a period of my life that I never completely put away.

The recording made that cycle much more explicit. The poem is short and almost conversational; the song expands it into something deeper and more atmospheric. 'Winter’s coming, I can feel it crawl' turns the season almost into a physical presence, and the chorus finally says what I couldn't really say at the time: 'I shut down too soon, / You got caught in the freeze. / It was never about you / It was always me.' That’s what 'Dead End' ultimately became for me—a recognition that the damage I was carrying didn’t just affect me. Someone else got caught in it too, and she paid a price for a winter that wasn’t hers."

Q: “What We Never Was” has a very evocative, visual scene attached to its origins. How did it evolve from its early hotel-room fragments?

David Kitzmiller: "The earliest version of 'What We Never Was' barely qualified as a poem. I actually titled it “Did I Check for Bed Bugs,” which tells you pretty much everything about how unfinished it was. But even in that rough version, the emotional core was there. I was sitting alone in a cheap motel room, thinking about someone I hadn’t seen in what felt like forever. The line 'I ain’t seen you since Tuesday / three months ago next week' came from that strange way my mind starts measuring time when I am missing someone. A few days can feel like months. A room that should be temporary can suddenly feel like the entire world. It was basically a snapshot of that loneliness—an empty bathtub, a phone full of photographs, unanswered questions, and the feeling that whatever 'us' might have been had already become a shadow.

When I came back to it, I realized the setting was already doing most of the emotional work. I didn’t need to explain the loneliness; I needed to put the listener inside that room. So the song became much more involved. The empty bathtub becomes 'No water, just memories,' the cheap motel gets the buzzing neon through the blinds, and scrolling through her photographs becomes an attempt to 'press rewind.' The song also gave the loneliness somewhere to go. Instead of simply saying I was thinking about her, it became this whole environment where unanswered questions echo off the walls and silence becomes 'the loudest sound I trust.'

I think the title change is important because 'What We Never Was' isn’t really a traditional breakup song. There was a relationship—or at least the possibility of one—but there was also something unresolved about it, something that never quite became what it might have been. That can be harder to let go of than an actual ending because you’re not only grieving what happened; you’re grieving what you imagined could happen. By the end, the motel room has almost become a character itself, filled with the 'shadow of us.' The song grew out of a very small, unfinished poem, but recording it let me turn that little fragment of loneliness into a place the listener could actually walk into.

Q: Unlike most of your deeply autobiographical work, “Sunday Dinner” looks outward. What led you to write about someone else’s marital breakdown?

David Kitzmiller: "'Sunday Dinner' is unusual for me because it isn’t really autobiographical. It came from watching a friend struggle in their marriage and seeing how something that seemed so simple had become almost impossible to ask for. What she wanted wasn’t complicated. She wanted to hear 'I love you.' She needed reassurance, needed to feel loved and safe, but she didn’t know how to say that directly, and the relationship had reached a point where even that simple need had become buried under everything else. That got me thinking about how many relationships fall apart because people don’t know how to ask for the thing they actually need. The original poem came from that image of her sitting alone in the dark after an argument, replaying his words and wishing for something that should have been so basic.

Because I was writing from someone else’s experience, I didn’t want the song to become a judgment of either person. I was more interested in putting the listener inside that room with her. The recording gave me the opportunity to make the silence and aftermath feel physical. The living room becomes 'the wreckage of their quiet war,' his voice is still echoing in the room, and her 'Love me… LOVE ME TONIGHT' becomes less a demand than a desperate plea. The music widened the emotional space around the poem and let the loneliness linger after he had already walked out.

What I find most painful about the song is that neither person necessarily needed something extraordinary. She needed to be loved and to hear it; he apparently couldn’t give her that. By the end, she’s still standing, but barely, and the final 'Love me tonight' remains in the room after he’s gone. I think that’s why the song works for me: it isn’t really about who was right or wrong. It’s about how something as fundamental as needing to feel loved can become impossible to communicate until the relationship is already broken."

Q: The closing track, “Can’t,” feels like a total emotional collapse. Why did you decide to include something so unsparing and dark to end the album?

David Kitzmiller: "'Can’t' was written in the middle of my divorce from the Second Ex-Wife, probably the lowest point I had reached at that time. Every thought seemed to begin with the word 'can’t.' I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t sleep, couldn’t eat, couldn’t recognize myself. I was losing my marriage, my family, and, in a lot of ways, my sense of who I was.

I wasn't trying to make the darkness sound poetic. I was documenting what it felt like to be completely overwhelmed by it. That’s part of why I hesitated to put it on the album. There’s no easy turn in the song, no obvious moment where everything gets better. It just keeps descending.

But every album in the Toaster series seems to need at least one song that comes from the deepest part of me, and 'Can’t' became that song. The repetition actually helped when we recorded it. All those 'can’ts' became almost rhythmic, like a mind that can't find another way to think. The fingerpicked guitar and quieter vocals kept it intimate rather than turning it into something dramatic. I wanted it to feel like someone sitting alone with thoughts they can't escape.

As the song develops, it gets more specific about what was lost—my relationship, my family, my hope, and the person I thought I was supposed to be. And by the end, there’s a small but important shift: 'Can’t be your demon anymore.' That line matters to me because it’s the first moment where I’m separating myself from the role I had come to occupy in that relationship."