“A River Ain’t Too Much To Love,” the new album by Smog (aka Bill Callahan), begins with a single plucked note. Left suspended in the air for several seconds, it asks to be turned over and considered by the ear. It isn’t much of an exaggeration to say this single note encapsulates Callahan’s entire style. He is a poet of minor incidents and thoughtful moments, exploring the slowly evolving stuff that the rest of us are too distracted and impatient to notice, let alone contemplate.

The album was recorded at Willie Nelson’s Pedernales Studio in Spicewood, Texas, and it has a Western movie pacing, though not a particularly Western sound. The arrangements are simple guitar and piano parts that place Callahan’s rich baritone and richer lyricism right up front.

Take, for instance, the song “The Well” – a seven-minute epic of the ordinary, related almost in real time. It begins: “I could not work, so I threw a bottle into the woods / and then I felt bad for the doe paw and the rabbit paw / so I went looking for the pieces of the bottle that I threw.” The events that follow are too mundane to recount in detail, but Callahan imbues them with uncommon meaning. At one point he stares into the black of a well: “They say black is all colors at once / so I gave it my red rage / my yellow streak / the greenest parts of me / and my blues,” he sings. He manages to find the same rainbow of color in all the monochrome events of life.

His uncluttered approach to the present makes room for what he calls “the pornography of my past.” Over a background of haunted voices reminiscent of a Death in Vegas song, “Drinking at the Dam” recalls furtive, formative moments of rebellion and longing. When he sings “skinmags in the brambles / for the first part of my life / I thought women had orange skin,” I’m transported to the woods behind my own childhood home and memories of excitedly turning rain-soaked pages with a stick.

In order to maintain his clearheadedness, Callahan isolates himself from the busyness of modern life – or fantasizes about it anyway. In the song “Running the Loping,” he dreams of escaping to the country “with a chicken and those other things.” It, too, is something of an abstraction. “To take a wife and no paper / never again to wonder / did that rapper rape her,” he sings longingly.

It is surprising, then, to find him engaging global politics on the album. However, the way he does it is perfectly characteristic: He imagines warring nations as children fighting. “When I was a boy / I used to get into it bad with my sister / and when the time came to face the truth / there’d be only tears and sides, tears and sides,” he sings. “And my mother, my poor mother / would say it does not matter, it does not matter / just stop fighting / Oh do I feel like the mother of the world.” The issues of the wider world are, to his mind, just personal experiences writ large.

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For today’s cutting-edge pop artists, new releases aren’t just a chance to showcase their talents, but also their taste; with the inclusion of authorized remixes on official releases, they act as curators as well as creators. The deluxe edition of Beck’s new album “Guero,” for instance, was accompanied by remixes from electronic favorites Boards of Canada, Royksopp, Octet, and Dizzee Rascal.

M.I.A. and Bjork go one better, inviting the general public to participate in remaking their music. In response to the deluge of remixes appearing on the Web, M.I.A.’s label, XL, has launched Online Piracy Funds Terrorism, a site that enables people to download clean vocal tracks, remix them, and post the results for all to hear. There are 50 remixes available now at xlrecordings.com/features/mia/onlinepiracy/index.html.

What’s most surprising about the results is their overall quality. A remix of “Pull Up the People” by someone called Bad Producer sounds like a funk inflected Jay-Z joint. The drop bomb remix of the same song has a catchy retro Atari sound. Both hold their own alongside the album versions.

Today, Bjork releases a like-minded project in “Army of Me – Remixes and Covers.” Last year, she invited all comers to interpret her song “Army of Me” from the 1995 album “Post.” Some 600 entries were submitted, from which she selected 20, all by unknown (to me, anyway) artists, for this release.

The assortment is even more eclectic than the M.I.A. project – many of the versions were worked up from scratch. The album opens with a Marilyn Manson-sounding metal version by group called Interzone. Other songs also seem chosen more for their quirkiness and shock value than their quality.

But a few are quite good. A clicking, electronic-pastoral version by someone called Atoi sounds like the band Mum. And there’s a thrilling riot of electronics and helium-voiced singing by a group called 50hrz.

One can imagine a day when the Becks, Bjorks, and M.I.A.s of the world use this open-source model primarily. They could simply prepare bare-bones vocal tracks, then let the hordes of eager home PC producers have at them, paying those whose work they actually use. Army of me indeed.