Maybe even the only feature of TFG. Who knows? To the point. Mr. Joaquin Ochoa has flattered me into posting a Band of the Week. Given my immense talents for organization, you can expect to see the next one of these sometime in August, probably. But for this week, here goes:

My little blog-brother with the Ph.D. talked me into meeting him and his SO at a little joint down in the Deepest of Ellums to see a band called the Dead End Angels, one of his absolute faves. So, on a rainy night in Dallas, even though I currently detest Deep Ellum, I did so, given that Kevin has generally pretty good taste in music. A nice evening of Shiners, conversation, and damn good music proceeded to occur. The DEA were, indeed, everything that Kevin had said they were.

But they’re not what this is about. This is about one of the finest lady singers I’ve ever heard: Libbi Bosworth. She was singing harmony* with the DEA that night, trying to work her way back from vocal surgery. Bowled me right over, she did. Her voice was one of those that just reaches out and grabs you deep in your heart. I can’t remember if I bought her solo CD that night or if I bought it over the interwebs later, but I did. And it’s exactly what I hoped it would be — torchy, twangy, sweet, touching, flirty, slinky. Just an all-around GREAT record.

Now, the unfortunate thing is that Libbi soon had to quit the DEA, and undergo still more (and even more after that) vocal surgery. All of the gory details are on her website if you want to read about it all. To me, it sounds horrifying — cutting on a throat sounds absolutely crazy. But when you’ve got a voice like Libbi’s, and you obviously can use it to the effect that she does, I have to applaud her for undergoing that hell to try to get it back to form. So far, though, the results have been mixed, according to her. So far, nothing new, and nothing on the horizon for her fans.

But…my advice to you is to go ahead and order up her 2001 record, Libbiville, from her web site. #1, you get Libbi really stretching it out all over the style map — there will be something on there you like (I like the whole thing). #2, you get all kinds of big names backing her in the studio…Lloyd Maines, Bruce Robison, Gurf Morlix, Don Walser (I love their duet), that kind of thing. Most importantly to me, though, you put some money in Libbi’s pocket to pay for another one of those surgeries, and that might just be the one that fixes everything and gets Libbi back to recording and touring. And that would be a great thing for music lovers all over Texas.

Now, if yall aren’t gonna go buy the music I’m talking about here, there’s no point in my typing all this up. So limber up the ol’ debit card and get to buying. You wouldn’t hurt yourself to buy the DEA’s stuff, too.

* What’s singing harmony? What’s singing melody? This music vocabulary confuses me (the guy they kicked out of music class in 5th grade at John Hanby Elementary - my voice is that bad). All I know is she hit all the notes just right.