AceShowbiz -

Bruce Springsteen is ready to make a splash with his new album, "High Hopes". Set to be released on January 14 through Columbia Records, the singer's eighteenth studio will feature covers and "some of our best unreleased material from the past decade." The E Street Band and tourmate Tom Morello are set to make appearance in the follow-up to 2012's "Wrecking Ball".

"The best way to describe this record is that's it's a bit of an anomaly. But not much. I don't really work linearly like a lot of people do," Springsteen recently told Rolling Stone of the album, which includes a cover of Suicide's "Dream Baby Dream" as well as "Harry's Place" and "Down in the Hole" which he originally wrote for 2002's "The Rising".

He went on explaining how the "anomaly" album happened. "I go in my studio where I'm surrounded by, hopefully, interesting things that I think that our fans might be [interested in] hearing, and I then proceed to work on them and see if I can bring something to fruition. Which is, for me, where I say, 'Okay, this is something that's focused enough and at a quality level where I think it won't waste my fans' time and they will enjoy hearing it,' " he explained

"That's kind of the way that I work, so it sort of explains this group of music a little bit in the sense that it's music that I've been working on over the past decade. Some of it was unfinished, so there was a lot of new recording on it," he added.

Springsteen also said that Morello made big contributions to the album. He said, "I don't have the set list in front of me, but 'High Hopes' and 'Harry's Place' and 'Heaven's Wall' and certainly 'American Skin' and 'Ghost of Tom Joad'. Those were two songs that I said, 'Okay, these are two of my best songs that I've written over the past 10 or 20 years.' And they didn't have a formal presentation on a studio record. When that happens, a song always loses a little of its authority. There's something about formally presenting it to your audience that I think makes a difference."

"I said, 'I really want these songs. They need that sort of presentation.' We went in and re-recorded those things with Tom, and his presence made a big, big difference," he continued. "He obviously brings those things to great life and deepens them and deepens the characters. Tom had a big, big hand in its existence. It was a way of being like, 'You know what? There's material that exists, but it's not fully-realized.' He helped me realize those songs that he came in and worked on. Now this feels like a record to me."