The centerpiece of the album is the remarkable “Round Eye Blues,” a song about a Vietnam vet who, even as he stares out the window upon his urban neighborhood, still sees “tracers fly through the jungle trees.” It sounds like the voice of one of those men in Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried,” one who made it home, set to a Phil Spector pop hit. Yet nearly all of the tune’s soft edges have been stripped away, and the Wall of Sound now includes castanets, machine-gun fire and the wails of “gut-shot friends.” Out there in those jungles, he says, “your hearts are filled with fear.” Like a grunt running to reach the last chopper, he grabs onto the chorus of “Be My Baby,” repeating it several times. It’s a stunning moment, one that captures the way public traumas like war are always personal, the way they make personal relationships desperately important and the way those relationships, recognized and linked, can forge a community.

It is that sense of a community, of a specific time and place and the different people who all identify it as their home, that “Kids in Philly” expresses best. Marah’s South Philadelphia is as vivid as Springsteen’s Asbury Park or the Bottle Rockets’ Festus, Mo. The streets Marah sing about feel boxed in, limited, because they are: Sections of Philly are among the most poverty-stricken urban areas in America. Yet, Marah insist, its residents keep it vibrating with life. In fact, the limits, and the ways that they are negotiated and endured, are their lives: “My heart is this wondrous city, with its love and its life and its one slamming door,” David Bielanko sings at the end of a “doo-wop meets poetry slam” number called “My Heart Is the Bums on the Street.”

The entire album is a series of slammed doors, of hearts that keep beating. In “The Catfisherman,” pushed by an acoustic rhythm guitar riff that rocks harder than most electrics, a man fishes for food off a pile of rubble on the banks of the Delaware River. He knows his neighborhood well enough to carry a “sharp-ass blade case a motherfucker wanna make trouble.” But mainly he’s having a blast. “I got a radio play blues, soul and funk,” he shouts. “It only gets one station, it’s the one that I want!” The men and women here, in other words, don’t simply make do with what they’ve been handed. They make joy — or, as Litt puts it at the conclusion of “Christian Street” and as Marah put it all through “Kids in Philly,” “rock ‘n’ roll.”

Because Jimmie Dale Gilmore has so often discussed his interest in Eastern thought in interviews, and because his spirituality appears to have become a primary focus of his songwriting, it’s hard to listen to his latest album, “One Endless Night,” in anything other than a Zen context. Many of Gilmore’s compositions encourage this approach. Like his earlier releases (“Spinning Around the Sun” remains my favorite), “One Endless Night” delivers a contemporary fusion of rock ‘n’ roll and country music that seems to have risen naturally from the west Texas plains. But then Gilmore’s words stride across this scenery wearing sandals and carrying a meditation cushion.

“Defying Gravity,” a track that explodes from the silence with a burst of drum and organ the rest of the cut never manages to match, is a good example. “I live on a big round ball, I never do dream I may fall/And even if one day I do, well I’ll jump off and smile back at you,” he sings, sounding for all the world like a playful, grinning Buddha, one fronting a turn-of-this-century country band. Elsewhere, the lines “To be the last, to be the only one, for all and everything” or “This too shall pass, we two and everything,” both from the title track, arrive like roots-rock koans.

In fact, the entire album has the full, warm, snapping twang one has come to expect from the music made in the living-room studio of roots-rock songwriter/producer Buddy Miller, though the arrangements, here and there, also seem needlessly restrained and careful, particularly on the ballads. That said, the point of a Gilmore record is his voice, that remarkable high tenor, as expressive as it is distinctive. When Gilmore has a go at Willis Alan Ramsey’s “Goodbye Ole Missoula,” for instance, it’s hard to think of a singer who can more perfectly convey human loss. That’s not the same as saying Gilmore has the ability to transform sadness into beauty, as it is usually put, but rather that he somehow expresses the ways that sadness is already beautiful, perfect just the way it is.

“Goodbye Ole Missoula” is among the exceptions here, mainly because elsewhere Gilmore sings so cautiously. On the title track, it’s as if he’s sneaking up on the verses and never catches up. On “Down by the Guadalupe” and “No Lonesome Tune,” his usually emotional voice is pretty but dulled — and so on. Metaphysically, he sings not like he’s relinquishing ego but suppressing it. Musically, the album mostly sounds high and lonesome without the lonesome.

Which is a shame. The songs Gilmore sings on “One Endless Night” are often filled with the most crippling sorts of sorrow. But when, for instance, he tells the story of “Darcy Farrow,” a young girl who dies unexpectedly just before marrying, he could just as easily be singing about a woman who didn’t die, or about any woman at all; he could be singing about washing the dishes. As in too many of his performances, Gilmore sings as if he has mistaken a detached observation of the moment for being in that moment.

The album concludes (not counting “Ft. Worth and Dallas,” a track “hidden,” I’d guess, because it rocks so much harder than anything else on the disc) with an unexpected version of “Mack the Knife.” As Gilmore recounts the grim tale — “When the shark bites through his victim, scarlet spreads amongst the rain” — a bass drum tolls behind him, but quietly, and a steel guitar seems to drop shimmering tears. Gilmore’s voice, quivering and alone, creepy and scared but calm enough to also be amazed by the scene, is just, well, beautiful.

If this turns out to be true — and, since his recent NBC special couldn’t even outperform “Beverly Hills 90210″ or “Cosby,” it very well might — the reason will be the change in personas, not the music itself. The liner notes to this make-believe greatest hits collection inform us that the singles from Chris Gaines’ four immensely popular (and non-existent) solo releases have “defined our times over the last decade.” It must have been one anachronistic decade for Gaines and his imaginary audience. Nearly every cut on the album sounds as if it could’ve been a singer-songwritery pop hit from 10 to 20 years earlier. That’s no surprise: Brooks has long claimed James Taylor, Dan Fogelberg and Billy Joel as inspirations. This time out, though, he seems to be indulging a serious Kenny Loggins jones. More than a few cuts here recreate those pristine yet limp “I’m Alright” harmonies. Two examples: “Digging for Gold” sounds precisely as if Kenny Loggins were fronting Fleetwood Mac; “Snow In July,” a bit of singer-songwriter-era white-boy soul, could have been lifted whole from, of all things, the Sanford/Townsend Band’s 1977 album “Smoke From a Distant Fire,” to which Loggins contributed backing vocals.

There are occasional older references here — Garth Gaines’ earliest cuts are self-consciously Beatlesque — and some contemporary influences, too. The project’s first single, “Lost in You,” expertly clones a standard Babyface ballad sound; the only major difference is that Brooks is incapable of cloning Kenneth Edmonds’ sweet falsetto. “Mainstreet” just as clearly mimics the Wallflowers. It was, the liner notes say, an “instant classic” upon release. (In a roundabout way this is actually true; its verses borrow whole the melody from “Knockin on Heaven’s Door.”)

As even his most loyal fans will attest, Brooks’ country music has touched people’s lives not because he’s cool, but because he appears so damn ordinary. Brooks is an energetic but technically limited singer — Chris Gaines highlights the limitations more than ever — and since he routinely comes off onstage as a tubby, amiable goofball, he can’t exactly compete in Nashville’s Hat-Act beauty contest, either. He has been a kind of anti-pop star, normal to the extreme, earnest when irony was king. His career was fueled more by message than visage.

The songs that lifted the old Brooks persona from success to superstardom — the ones that, in concert, the crowd sings for him — were embraced by his massive audience because they offered ways to make meaning, lessons to live by: What we desire and what is best for us are, sometimes, completely different things (“Unanswered Prayers”); what brings us joy and what brings us pain are very often the same thing (“The Dance”); a life worth living is one that risks passion and failure (“Standing Outside the Fire”); a life of pretension is no life at all (“Friends in Low Places”).

Absent even the pose of sincerity that distinguished these earlier hits, “In the Life of Chris Gaines” is all pretension, and there lies its failure. Put simply, by subtracting his regular-guy public face for a cool new pop persona, Brooks has subtracted what made people connect with him in the first place. This is played out most clearly in Chris Gaines’ lyrics — written, like many of Brooks songs, by seasoned pros — which consistently reject any sort of hard-won Brooksian wisdom for generic romances, self-indulgent Cali-rock scenarios and “We Didn’t Start the Fire” fatalism.

Though this tendency is apparent all through the album, it can be seen most plainly in the album’s second single, “Right Now.” The song consists of the chorus from the Youngbloods’ “Get Together” (“Come on people now/Smile on your brother”) stitched flimsily to a Cheryl Wheeler poem called “If It Were Up to Me.” As Brooks performs this Frankenstein monster, he ticks off a number of societal ills (“Maybe it’s the high schools, maybe it’s the teachers/Tattoos, pipe bombs underneath the bleachers”). But then, like a door slammed shut, the song just ends, not with the Youngbloods’ hopeful suggestion but with, “Or maybe it’s the end.” This music doesn’t attempt to place meaning in the world, which has always been what made Brooks Brooks. Instead, it sees the world and throws up its hands in surrender. And who’ll buy that?

On his special the other night, Brooks called his pop move “a stretching of the arms” to embrace a larger audience. But what really stands out about this new music is how assiduously it keeps us all at arm’s length. Brooks’ willingness to distance himself from his audience, from the persona that made him a hero to millions, has been coming for a long time now. Can we trace it back to when he decided to swing high above his audience on a wire? To when he came out against used CDs? To when he first referred to himself in the third person? Regardless, with “In the Life of Chris Gaines” the transformation is complete. Chris Gaines is a zero, as we could’ve predicted, but now finally there’s no Brooks here either.