Anyone ever play the video game "The Sims"? I was booting up the internets, sitting at a desk looking out a window of my house. A woman pulled up in a minivan, parked in the street, obviously intending to go to the park across the street. She seemed somewhat out of sorts and was apparently moving a child safety seat from one seat in her car to another, a frustrating process with which I am familiar. Anyway, another woman pulled up behind her and she also looked a little sad. It is an overcast day - the kind of day where Dr. Bob would have had to give us a pep talk in Viking Chorus to keep us from singing flat and slow.

So then the two women started talking. I was vaguely listening to them, but the nice weatherproof window here kept me from hearing actual words. They sounded exactly like Sims. And as they talked, their moods both improved. By the time they were ready to walk together over to the volleyball court, they were talking loud, laughing and slapping each other on the back. I imagined pop up menus had appeared next to both of them and someone had set them to "talk...joke...touch...talk...comfort...joke...etc." It was very funny if you've ever played Sims.

This articulates and explains clearly something I have struggled with for years:

http://funl.blogspot.com/2007/06/loudness-war.html

What a great article. I remember mixing and mastering the Urban Rust and Jubilant Dogs CDs and being frustrated at my seeming inability to match the volume of, say, They Might Be Giants' John Henry, which has always struck me as a singularly loud, monolithic slab of continuous volume.

The problem comes when a J. Dogs or UR fan who is also a TMBG fan (someone like me, for example) is listening to their iPod (okay, I don't have or want an iPod) on shuffle and they turn up for something I've produced, then get blown away when some latter day TMBG comes on next. Youch! This is exactly why I don't have an iPod. I'm still waiting for the great leap forward where this problem will somehow be solved.