I’ve got a recommendation, which is check out the Lizzy Ross Band and climb on the bandwagon before she takes off. This way when she’s super-famous and popular as all get-out, you can be one of those people who say, obnoxiously, “Oh, the first few albums were great but now that she’s all famous she’s totally sold out.”

However, in order to get to the point where people erroneously and vindictavely accuse her of selling out, you should first check out the North Carolina singer’s new album “Read Me Out Loud.” Folksy, jazzy, bluesy in all the best senses of those words, it’s like country music the way you wish country music would be rather than the redoubt of pop triflngs it is. Ross carries the songs along, from the mournful cemetery ballad of “Black River” that opens the album to the joyful “Cross the Cuyahoga,” with a voice like cigarettes and the smoothest whiskey you’ve ever tasted.

Full disclosure: I met Lizzy Ross, winner of the 2011 Carolina Music Award for Rock Female and the 2011 Best Female Blues artist at the Charlotte Music Awards, because she dates one of my best friends from college–coincidentally also named Ross.

When Ross told me she was a singer, I thought he meant in the way that any chachbag with a guitar playing for the Tuesday crowd at McGees is a singer. Like what I would probably be if I’d ever managed to master that F chord on the guitar. But no, I listened to some of her stuff via her website, and I was like, “Holy shit. Ross way overshot on the woman I thought he was capable of convincing to put up with his drunken shenanigans.”

I’d heard some of the songs on “Read Me Out Loud” before he sent me a copy of the CD, but it’s been on regular rotation on my iPod since it arrived. With terrific songwriting, interesting arrangments, and Ross’s (Lizzy, not “Ross” Ross) microphone-rattling voice, it does what great blues/folk music should do, which is to make you feel like you’re home even if it’s not the home that would spring to mind when you say that word.

For some reason it makes me think of me, Ross (my college buddy, not Lizzy) and our four other roommates sophomore year when we used to get drunk and heave cinderblocks over our heads in a game we called “We’re Awesome” (true story). It reminds me of North Carolina and northeastern Ohio. It reminds me of friends I’ve had and friends I probably don’t even know yet.

Someone (Lincoln Hall, the Vic) please book her, so Chicago can see her live, and Ross and I can play a rubber-match game of We’re Awesome.