Plenty of artists are previewing their albums via iTunes, but Bruce Springsteen is about to become the first to unveil his new work at the law offices of Florrick & Agos.
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Springsteen’s upcoming album High Hopes, set for release on Jan. 14, will be streaming in its entirety on CBS.com. The album will be available following this Sunday’s brand-new episode of The Good Wife, which will feature snippets of songs from the new album during the preview for the Jan. 12 episode, which will prominently feature three of the tracks from High Hopes: “The Ghost of Tom Joad,” “Hunter Of Invisible Game,” and “High Hopes.”
The stream of Springsteen’s High Hopes will be available on CBS.com/Springsteen through Monday night, Jan. 13 at 7 p.m. ET — just in time for the album to go on sale to the public the following morning.
For The Good Wife creators and hardcore Springsteen fans Robert and Michelle King, this is the perfect arrangement. “He’s so brilliant and fantastic,” Michelle says. “Getting to hear High Hopes early was one of the perks of the job.”
“When they played us the album, it was this top-secret thing where they came to our offices,” Robert says. “There were three songs that immediately popped out, and we were like, ‘We need those!’ We would have used the whole album if we could.”
The Jan. 12 episode that features those three songs, titled “We, The Juries,” was still shooting when the Kings heard the songs, and the tunes informed the editing process. “With ‘Hunter Of Invisible Game,’ for example, we play a fairly long chunk of it over the last three and a half minutes of the episode,” Robert says. “We were drawn more to the feel of the music, and there was a dreamy quality that seemed to tie together different moods. I don’t want to give anything away, but in the episode there are some depressing moments and some comic moments, and we had to find one song that could bring that together and say this is all of one piece. There was a driving, dreamlike quality that I thought tied everything together.”
Perhaps the most excited about this development was episode writer Keith Eisner. “We brought Keith in to hear it, and he was hopping up and down he was so excited,” Robert says.
“He’s from New Jersey, so it was meaningful beyond meaningful for him,” Michelle adds.
The Kings hope that by setting this experience with Springsteen will set a precedent for future music integration on the show. “We have to see if we can get the rights, but there’s one upcoming episode we have in mind where the episode is really built around a song,” Robert says. “What we’re looking for by the end of the year is using a song by a Springsteen-stature artist where the song becomes part of the plot, and the plot gets pushed along that way. They did stuff like that on Miami Vice, where they took a song of that period and wrote towards it. I don’t think people are exploring that enough. Movies have dropped off the radar that way. But by doing 22 episodes a year, we have the ability to do a little more experimentation with how the music weaves into the episode.”
Stream Bruce Springsteen’s High Hopes at CBS.com/Springsteen right after this Sunday’s episode of The Good Wife, and get ready for the following week’s episode featuring tracks from the album.
