Bruce Springsteen will release a new full-length collection in 2014 - NJ.com

Nearly two years after the release of the "Wrecking Ball" album ^[1] — the seventeenth in his career — Bruce Springsteen is ready to return with another full-length.

Unlike its predecessor, the songs on the album won't be conceptually linked — at least not intentionally. "High Hopes," which will be out on Jan. 14, a twelve-track set, will contain rarities, covers, re-recordings, and studio versions of concert favorites alongside never-before-heard compositions by the Boss. In the liner notes Springsteen calls it "an album of some of our best unreleased material from the past decade" — songs that he feels deserve "a home and a hearing."

The "High Hopes" album will include the provocative "American Skin (41 Shots)," an elegy written in 1999 in the wake of the shooting of the Guinean immigrant Amadou Diallo by members of the New York City Police Department. The song, which was performed by Springsteen and the E Street Band on the turn-of-the-millennium reunion tour, was controversial: Police unions objected strenuously to the lyric. "American Skin" helped solidify Springsteen's reputation — already well established by then, and taken to new extremes on the "Wrecking Ball" album — as a politically engaged songwriter with an accusatory finger pointed straight at the muscled chest of the establishment. The Boss and his band resurrected "American Skin" on the Wrecking Ball Tour ^[2] after the acquittal of George Zimmerman, the neighborhood watchman who shot and killed Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Fla. At concerts on the tour, Springsteen dedicated "American Skin" to Martin — and his renditions of the song were tough and focused.

"The Ghost of Tom Joad," which will also be on "High Hopes" in a re-recorded version, is a similarly confrontational song. The title track from Springsteen's 1995 solo album introduced many of the themes that the Boss would later develop on "Wrecking Ball" and the war-weary "Devils and Dust" album. In the song, which paints a dystopian picture of the New World Order, Springsteen paraphrases John Steinbeck's "The Grapes of Wrath." (Tom Joad is the itinerant hero of the novel — a man who keeps his morality and integrity intact despite his impoverishment.) Springsteen and the E Street band played the song regularly on the Australian leg of the Wrecking Ball Tour ^[3] , where the band was joined on guitar by fellow traveler Tom Morello, the guitarist of politicized rap-rock band Rage Against the Machine. Morello adds his six-string to the "High Hopes" version of "Tom Joad."

Morello, who plays on eight of the twelve songs on the new album, also appears on the title track — one of several covers of material by relatively obscure bands. "High Hopes," a song heavily influenced by Springsteen's blue-collar balladry of the late-'70s and '80s, was written by Tim Scott McConnell and recorded by The Havalinas, his band, in 1990. Springsteen initially covered "High Hopes" on the hard-to-find 1995 "Blood Brothers" EP. "Just Like Fire Would," a song written and cut by the Brisbane band The Saints, will also get the Springsteen treatment on "High Hopes." (That Australian leg of the Wrecking Ball Tour ^[4] seems to have really pushed the Boss. In the liner notes to the new album, Springsteen thanks Morello for inspiring him.)

Anybody who caught Bruce Springsteen on the solo Devils and Dust Tour likely heard him play "Dream Baby Dream," an emotionally wrenching song by the New York City band Suicide. The Boss' version of "Dream" closes "High Hopes."

"The Wall," a song written in the late '90s by Springsteen after visiting the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, will be the penultimate track the new album. "Harry's Place," an outtake from the 2002 set "The Rising," has made the upcoming project, too. About "Heaven's Wall," "This Is Your Sword," "Down in the Hole," "Hunter of Invisible Game," and "Frankie Fell in Love" — all highly Springsteen-ian titles confirmed to be on "High Hopes" — we'll just have to wait and see.