Leave it to Ray Davies, pop music’s quintessential Englishman, to make a—if not the—definitive album about life in these United States.

Based on his 2013 memoir of the same name, Americana (Sony Legacy) finds the erstwhile Kinks frontman paying conflicted tribute to America, his decades’ worth of adventures therein, and the emotional ups and downs consequent upon his discovering that American realities often fall short of the American dream.

It’s an album that he has been trying to make for over a decade. What he made instead were Other People’s Lives (2006) and Working Man’s Café (2007), craftsmanlike efforts that would’ve felt creditable coming from lesser talents but that felt dispiritingly unspectacular coming from the composer of “You Really Got Me,” “Waterloo Sunset,” “Come Dancing,” “Celluloid Heroes,” “God’s Children,” and all of The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society.

One reason that his solo masterpiece remained elusive is that, no matter how he tried, he couldn’t assemble a studio band with the organic or sympathetic spontaneity of The Kinks. But by enlisting for Americana The Jayhawks, a group whose modern country-rock sound is emblematic of and practically synonymous with the music-genre connotations of the album’s title, Davies has finally hurdled that obstacle.

Besides giving the album’s 13 songs and two spoken interludes a warm and diverse musical bed, The Jayhawks contribute harmony and background vocals that at key moments (the title track’s refrain, for instance) provide the 72-year-old Davies’ charming but occasionally reedy singing with a lush aural nimbus. And on “Message from the Road” and “A Place in Your Heart,” the co-lead vocals of the band’s keyboardist, Karen Grotberg, add a much-needed dimension to lyrics that could otherwise come off as macho rationalizations of a self-centered roadrunner’s unwillingness to commit.

But The Jayhawks’ contributions wouldn’t matter unless Americana’s melodies did. And, frankly, Davies hasn’t put this many good ones end-to-end in over 40 years. Only once, on “Poetry,” does he echo his younger self, and even then he’s echoing one of his catchiest tunes (“Starstruck”). The rest of the time, he’s tying up the loose ends of a career that has had more than its share of them—and riding confidently off into the sunset.

Playing Irish-American

Fifty years ago, pop music’s quintessential Irishman, Van Morrison, made his first run at becoming big in America by meeting up with the producer-songwriter Bert Berns in New York City, eventually completing 16 songs intended to be issued as singles for Berns’ Bang Records.

The best known of the batch, “Brown Eyed Girl,” became Morrison’s first solo hit. The second-best known, the 10-minute “T.B. Sheets,” portended his capacity for stream-of-consciousness improvisation and obsessively working a groove. He would re-record two of them (“Beside You,” “Madame George”) one year later for his Rubicon-crossing Warner Bros. debut, Astral Weeks.

Sony Legacy’s three-disc Authorized Bang Collection combines these recordings (all of which have been previously released and multiple times at that) with several alternate mixes and takes and 31 silly, passive-aggressive ditties that Morrison demoed to meet and to extract himself from the obligations of his Bang contract.

His motivation? Berns had taken half of Morrison’s Bang recordings and, without Morrison’s permission or knowledge, issued them as an album titled Blowin’ Your Mind! Its cover art was as pointlessly “psychedelic” as its title.

Morrison’s send-up of the event, in which he impersonates a Bang PR hack shopping an album called Blowin’ Your Nose, is The Authorized Bang Collection’s silly-ditty highlight. —A.O.