Tom's Diner wasn't just a benchmark. Brandenburg listened to it obsessively, over and over, to the exclusion of a lot of other content he might have done well to pay more attention to. Which is what tends to happen when you work on audio processing code, for better or worse.
So that's why the MP3 format mangles male vocals so badly at all but the highest bitrates. Now you know the Rest Of The Story... or at least you've read it on the Internet.
The reference is even more apt because the two of them have collaborated. She sang the led vocal on his song "Now I Am an Arsonist" (from the album Artificial Heart).
