I’m telling you…it’s either one thing or the other. Nothing in between. Listen to any U.S. commercial radio station (possible exception: Christian stations). What you’re going to get is pressure. Charisma. Energy. Beautiful music radio stations are gone — thought to be beyond geriatric; to advertisers, everybody dies at 49. Every American commercial station is a Top 40 station — including talk stations, news stations, sports stations. People hired to talk on the radio are hired to talk, even yell, at you, not to you or with you. O.K., maybe the Adult Alternative stations hire natural sounding people. All the rest must speak from an artificially compressed diaphragm. In talk radio, harangue-level voices rule. Right (mostly) or Left. Doesn’t matter. The dominant personality type is Self-Important Partisan Boor. And music radio must have the hyper-thyroid frozen-smile people, or the tough young smart-ass. Or the antisocial-outrageous male garbage-mouth thug. Meanwhile, NPR and PRI offer us plenty of authentic humans, though you can’t tell if many of their anchors are sedate or sedated. Everybody on U.S. radio sounds like they’re operating under immense pressure. Because they are. What would it take to create a nice station with people who sound normally happy, well-loved and professional? Any ideas?

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