Springsteen hasn't made much music that interests me in decades, but Darkness on the Edge of Town, The River and Born to Run are all-time favorites. Three classic albums in a row from '75-'80. I was 14-19 during that run so perhaps the adage that the music of your teens will always be your favorite is true.
I'm 43, and I see a lot of my circle doing much better financially than I am. (video production career, not quite as lucrative as I imagined.) We travel, pay our mortgage, pay all our bills. We're comfortably middle class, as much as I complain about it. Yet, I yearn to have a significant rainy day fund. We do not have that. That'd be nice. Would love to have supplemental income working for me, alas, I do not... Some day!
Branch Rickey nailed it. There isn’t any athlete worth millions of dollars. Burrow would shine like a star if his contract is written so 90% goes directly to his charitable foundation.
Good stuff. I retired June 2022 but 5 years later took a part-time job with a small, young company. I'm roughly double the age of most of my coworkers. It hasn't been bad, but I do have some difficulty relating to the younger guys. But at the same time it helps to keep me younger.
When I grow up I want to be a too-big-to-fail financial institution. If I mess up, the government will bail me out. If things go right, the government will give me cheap money, and I'll lend it out at a higher APR. You can't lose! Exactly how capitalism was supposed to work!
I have a pension, SS, & enough savings to live in an upscale apartment. ( So i don't know the pain of poverty.) And yes $$$ could bring instant joy to any person in poverty
$$$$ have not purchased my best happy , joyful moments nor protected me from my worst sorrowful moments.
But my kids, grandkids, friends, & sometimes even almost strangers have given priceless love that has created best of times & protected me during worst of times. I won't have a huge estate but that's alright. I know at this moment in time with good health & a wife still by my side that i have a peace that no $$$ can purchase..
I retired at 63 and a half. Our son got colon cancer at the age of 39. Work provided much for us. But too many nights and weekends wouldn't work for me after that. It was time. I'll never use work as a reason to say no anymore. He is recently married to his love and cancer free.
I'll take The Rising as my favorite. ( hard not to say Born to Run ). The timing after 9-11 and lyrics were spot on. But for a true fan, are there any duds?
Interesting. I almost brought up colorectal cancer in my other comment. On the radio this morning I heard that colorectal cancer is exploding in younger Americans, and scientists are concluding it's from microplastics. In a sane society, we would create new regulations to minimize this health threat, but the plastics industry (and insurance/banking/pharma/etc.) own the government. So, bring on the colon cancer! And, well, I won't get started on our private health insurance model.
I like to have enough to give some away and help people. Sometimes it feels better to do that when the accounts are low but still feels good to give some away. I agree doc, vacation time with family is always money well spent!
Just like any business a pro athlete deserves what the market will pay for their services. Guess that is why a certain major coffee joint gets $7 for a cup of coffee, people are lining up around the corner to pay that price.
Hard to watch the Reds struggling. They have been fun to watch this year.
Aug 29, 2023·edited Aug 29, 2023Liked by Paul Daugherty
Money has literally never motivated me. Ever. And I am fully aware that that in and of itself is a blessing. I have had little of it (to whit - I started out as a community newspaper reporter right out of college), and I have had plenty. I want to have enough for me and my family to live comfortably, of course, but as a main motivator? No.
I'd write for free - and have on more than one occasion. I do like getting paid for it, don't get me wrong. It's just not at all why I do it.
As for the sports part of this column - Yes, shut Abbott down. Don't risk the kid.
But, young or no, the team is clearly running on fumes. It's dig-deep time and they don't have the right shovels, apparently. They need someone to light a fuse - stat. Who? I do not know. Esp. if they tank against the Cubbies, Sept. is gonna be chillier than I thought.
I should probably care who the Bengals have as QB2, I really just don't. Just stay healthy QB1!
And Stafford needs to learn Snapchat and move on with his life...welcome to the new age, Gramps. Ironically, though, real life poker seems to be all the rage with the teen set where my son goes to high school.
It is Tunnel of Love for me, too. I like the title track a lot and Brilliant Disguise. Lots of good love & angst on that album...my favorite (fictional) combo!
Money... can't live with it, can't live without it. How many lottery winners or pro athletes have let money ruin their lives...And how many poor families struggle to make ends meet... I grew up in a lower middle class family with seven siblings. Money was always tight. But the lack of it didn't define who we were. Most of my siblings did well in life. I retired in January. My wife and I were conservative enough in our working years, to have it pretty sweet in retirement. I now work a lot with the homeless. Most of them would love the things we take for granted: food, housing, and transportation. But most of them would want nothing more than that. One of my homeless friends won $100,000 playing the lottery. He bought a used luxury car, had a girlfriend and a decent place to stay. A year later, all were gone and he was back on the streets. Money can make or break you...
Would heaping piles of money change the way I live? Yes. Drastically. Because I wouldn't be spending 40+ hours a week working. (To say nothing of the commute.) I've been lucky... I've had a job since fifth grade but never worked a day in my life. But I *have* put in a LOT of on-the-job hours to get good at what I do. For better or worse, that time has not been spent in a field that commands a lot of monetary compensation, but it has been enough to pay the bills, do some traveling, enjoy live arts and sporting events and put some away for the future. More money would mean more of the latter three and a shorter trip to retirement.
ToL was my first live Broooooce; I was 19, one of 11 friends packed into two cars and one room at the LaQuinta Inn. Up the thread Brant did a good job capturing the feel of the opening, but I'll never forget the ease with which Bruce brought the band - and the crowd - from standing, stomping, shouting and dancing to just taking a collective breath and listening in community. I've never seen anyone do it better in the rock-pop idiom.
First chapter in a fascinating read: the Psychology of Money, Morgan Housel, is a chapter called "No One's Crazy. In short, it states the obvious: people from different generations, raised by different parents, who earned different incomes and held different values, in different parts of the world, born into different economies, with different job markets, with different incentives and different degrees of luck learn very different lessons. So all of us live life anchored to a different set of views and beliefs about money and how it works, that will literally differ from everyone else's. What seems crazy to you may make lots of sense to me, and vice versa. But in reality, neither of us is crazy.
I grew up in poverty, single-parent home, managed to sneak into a rich priviledged school because I had a more intelligent older brother and an entire roster of wealthy donors who put poor kids like me through their alma mater. I was surrounded by opulence, parking my buick void of a painted hood or roof next to newer BMWs. I lived in utter jealousy. Always having cash for lunch, full tanks of gas, huge houses. Lot of those kids didn't need to incur major debt for higher secondary education either. I took on a mortgage worth of debt, because I was raised to believe good school means good job, good life for family. But in actuality, I was investing and training to be someone's asset, and good money would come at the expense of time with my family, for which I'm even working. So for me, besides the health of my family and myself, the pursuit of wealth is greater than literally anything else.
Anyone who says money can't solve all your problems has never lived without it. It's a lot easier being depressed with a full belly and no creditors than it is starving and downing in debt. I started my own business, took the ultimate risk, because I finally learned that under America's current model, W-2 employees aren't meant to have anything nice unless they're willing to amass debt and trade all of their time for money, and for over two decades, I did that. Nice vaca? Put it on the credit card, we'll live low after and pay it off in half a year. We need a car - can't drive something unsafe, so gotta take out a loan to get something nicer, something newer. Need bigger house to accomodate growing family. It's all a system designed to trap your ass into W-2 employment, and it works like a charm.
I had to start my own business because everything from our laws to our tax codes favor business owners and corporations, whereas the individual is meant to live in debt, working 50-60 hr weeks, taking orders from bosses needing you to adopt this career as a lifestyle like they have, living HUSTLE CULTURE, all so that they can, maybe retire by the time they're 65, or dead. Our parents grew up living this religiously. My generation appears to be a mixed bag on it. Gen Z has seen enough it appears. There's hope.
You've seen my reactions here when Mixon takes a pay cut - it physically makes me sick. Yes, he'd be cut without it, but I don't think we appreciate just what he's sacrificing, for a game that's literally killing him. Doc said it best, money affords time and freedom. But it also offers your offspring a safer path through the jungle. For me, life is way too short to spend so much of it doing something that makes you unhappy, for a wage that's taxed at nearly 40% in some cases, all to build someone else's generational wealth, who won't be trading their time for money for much longer even if they still are now.
I don't want to spend my existence chasing dollars, but in America, we have prioritized dollars over individuals. It has it pros, it arguably has way more cons. And not everyone shares in today's gains. At the root of all our problems here - wealth inequality can explain virtually everything. Crime is directly proportional to poverty.
For me, money is vitality. If you don't agree, no worries, you're not crazy. But iMO we should prioritize it accordingly, we should talk about it more, as much as we do the weather, because treating money like a taboo topic only favors the people who have all of it.
I'd reached many of those same conclusions too. I also started my own business a year and a half ago for those reasons, and this one..... back when the 08 crisis hit, so many of the dads in the neighborhood I grew up in lost their jobs in their 50s, and never really got back to work near the same level. I don't want to be in a position where I can be downsized at that age or older. My risk is real. If I fail I'll be out of money and back applying for a W2. I don't golf anymore. I make 90% of my food at home. I don't do many things that cost money. I'm still going backwards some each month, but I'm getting there. Thank god I'd saved enough to try this.
We should definitely talk more about money and the injustices in the American economy, but, alas, as soon as you do it's "class warfare".
Ambitious Americans used to want to have a career like George Romney. Now they want to have a career like Mitt Romney.
And, how has this not been brought up yet? If you're an attractive 18-25 year old girl with a nice butt and smile, you can make tens of thousands of dollars a week online 'working from home' posting dancing videos, and thirst trap photos. Where is this going? Why would any girl want a real job?
Lastly, I don't think that all dollars earned have the same moral equivalency. There are a lot of extremely well compensated roles out there that actively harm society.
Aug 29, 2023·edited Aug 29, 2023Liked by Paul Daugherty
I grew up in somewhat similar circumstances. Both parents were there. But only one of them took the job of parenting seriously. Nine kids, so money was tight. I passed the entrance exam to St X in the spring of 73. Tuition at the time was 1K per year. I could have worked my way through but then, as now, there was only so much I would do for money. I'm not sure how much happier I'd be today if I had been more ambitious. It seems to me that happiness comes and goes in pretty much the same pattern for the well off and the working stiff. But I enjoyed your perspective. It's a pity we all only get one shot at this game. It would be cool to try it both ways 🙂
$1,000 in 1973 dollars is roughly $6,900 in 2023 dollars. Something tells me St X is magnitudes more expensive than that today.
Housing prices, higher ed prices, medical costs..... no wonder a lot of younger Americans aren't having kids. And somewhere a boomer is saying that they worked their way through college, while leaving out that tuition was like $500 a semester.
Tunnel of Love is in my second Bruce tier along with Born in the USA. Both are equal parts great songs and filler, unlike the nonstop track by track winners that came before. But the great songs are indeed great, and the tour was awesome.
I’ve always considered time to be a precious asset well worth paying to acquire (my wife and I have neither cut the grass nor cleaned the house in 35 years). Retirement hasn’t changed that, just made me feel richer.
I would love to fly private if I had the $, but my sustainably minded daughter would never speak to me again if I became that much of a carbon dioxide generator.
Aug 29, 2023·edited Aug 29, 2023Liked by Paul Daugherty
Money does mean freedom to me. Especially as I get older. I can't do all the physical things I used to be able to do, so I can't get a job to back up my SSI or IRA. When it goes out now, it's out w/no return. That feels like a dark tunnel to me. I don't like to depend on others...but that is what single people have to deal with in life. Dangling participles.
My parents were penniless when they married after WWII. They became wealthy through hard work, obsessive saving, and compound interest. Given their Depression era childhood with the community reluctance to flaunt wealth, I don’t remember them ever expressing envy or comparing us to “rich people”. As you might imagine, though genetics or environment or whatever, it became my approach to money and life. Work hard, save everything you can, and invest wisely and carefully. I have lived in their shadow my whole life and give them all the credit.
It doesn’t bother me that wealth can be accumulated in America to unlimited levels because I believe it is what made us successful collectively. Others note that led to inequality that others can’t abide but it confirms in my mind the most likely path to success is economic freedom. We have a security net and plenty of regulation, but I know what poor looked like in the 1950’s and, even though it hasn’t disappeared, it looks a damn sight better now. Remember, it’s just my opinion, nothing else…
As for Boss albums, it has to be The Wild, The Innocent, and the E-Street Shuffle. Kitty, Wild Billy, Rosalita, and the sublime New York Serenade. Another one that changes my life.
Tunnel of Love is one of my favorite Bruce albums. It came out four months after I got married and it's themes of the mysteries of love coincided with the excitement and fear that comes with beginning a life together. Thirty six years later - still with my lovely bride - I recommended it to all three of my boys soon after their weddings.
Springsteen hasn't made much music that interests me in decades, but Darkness on the Edge of Town, The River and Born to Run are all-time favorites. Three classic albums in a row from '75-'80. I was 14-19 during that run so perhaps the adage that the music of your teens will always be your favorite is true.
lol @ Kimo VanAxe Murderer!
I'm 43, and I see a lot of my circle doing much better financially than I am. (video production career, not quite as lucrative as I imagined.) We travel, pay our mortgage, pay all our bills. We're comfortably middle class, as much as I complain about it. Yet, I yearn to have a significant rainy day fund. We do not have that. That'd be nice. Would love to have supplemental income working for me, alas, I do not... Some day!
Branch Rickey nailed it. There isn’t any athlete worth millions of dollars. Burrow would shine like a star if his contract is written so 90% goes directly to his charitable foundation.
Good stuff. I retired June 2022 but 5 years later took a part-time job with a small, young company. I'm roughly double the age of most of my coworkers. It hasn't been bad, but I do have some difficulty relating to the younger guys. But at the same time it helps to keep me younger.
When I grow up I want to be a too-big-to-fail financial institution. If I mess up, the government will bail me out. If things go right, the government will give me cheap money, and I'll lend it out at a higher APR. You can't lose! Exactly how capitalism was supposed to work!
TRUTH
I retired at 64 & today I am 81.
I have a pension, SS, & enough savings to live in an upscale apartment. ( So i don't know the pain of poverty.) And yes $$$ could bring instant joy to any person in poverty
$$$$ have not purchased my best happy , joyful moments nor protected me from my worst sorrowful moments.
But my kids, grandkids, friends, & sometimes even almost strangers have given priceless love that has created best of times & protected me during worst of times. I won't have a huge estate but that's alright. I know at this moment in time with good health & a wife still by my side that i have a peace that no $$$ can purchase..
That is all .
I retired at 63 and a half. Our son got colon cancer at the age of 39. Work provided much for us. But too many nights and weekends wouldn't work for me after that. It was time. I'll never use work as a reason to say no anymore. He is recently married to his love and cancer free.
I'll take The Rising as my favorite. ( hard not to say Born to Run ). The timing after 9-11 and lyrics were spot on. But for a true fan, are there any duds?
Interesting. I almost brought up colorectal cancer in my other comment. On the radio this morning I heard that colorectal cancer is exploding in younger Americans, and scientists are concluding it's from microplastics. In a sane society, we would create new regulations to minimize this health threat, but the plastics industry (and insurance/banking/pharma/etc.) own the government. So, bring on the colon cancer! And, well, I won't get started on our private health insurance model.
I like to have enough to give some away and help people. Sometimes it feels better to do that when the accounts are low but still feels good to give some away. I agree doc, vacation time with family is always money well spent!
Just like any business a pro athlete deserves what the market will pay for their services. Guess that is why a certain major coffee joint gets $7 for a cup of coffee, people are lining up around the corner to pay that price.
Hard to watch the Reds struggling. They have been fun to watch this year.
Money has literally never motivated me. Ever. And I am fully aware that that in and of itself is a blessing. I have had little of it (to whit - I started out as a community newspaper reporter right out of college), and I have had plenty. I want to have enough for me and my family to live comfortably, of course, but as a main motivator? No.
I'd write for free - and have on more than one occasion. I do like getting paid for it, don't get me wrong. It's just not at all why I do it.
As for the sports part of this column - Yes, shut Abbott down. Don't risk the kid.
But, young or no, the team is clearly running on fumes. It's dig-deep time and they don't have the right shovels, apparently. They need someone to light a fuse - stat. Who? I do not know. Esp. if they tank against the Cubbies, Sept. is gonna be chillier than I thought.
I should probably care who the Bengals have as QB2, I really just don't. Just stay healthy QB1!
And Stafford needs to learn Snapchat and move on with his life...welcome to the new age, Gramps. Ironically, though, real life poker seems to be all the rage with the teen set where my son goes to high school.
It is Tunnel of Love for me, too. I like the title track a lot and Brilliant Disguise. Lots of good love & angst on that album...my favorite (fictional) combo!
Money... can't live with it, can't live without it. How many lottery winners or pro athletes have let money ruin their lives...And how many poor families struggle to make ends meet... I grew up in a lower middle class family with seven siblings. Money was always tight. But the lack of it didn't define who we were. Most of my siblings did well in life. I retired in January. My wife and I were conservative enough in our working years, to have it pretty sweet in retirement. I now work a lot with the homeless. Most of them would love the things we take for granted: food, housing, and transportation. But most of them would want nothing more than that. One of my homeless friends won $100,000 playing the lottery. He bought a used luxury car, had a girlfriend and a decent place to stay. A year later, all were gone and he was back on the streets. Money can make or break you...
Would heaping piles of money change the way I live? Yes. Drastically. Because I wouldn't be spending 40+ hours a week working. (To say nothing of the commute.) I've been lucky... I've had a job since fifth grade but never worked a day in my life. But I *have* put in a LOT of on-the-job hours to get good at what I do. For better or worse, that time has not been spent in a field that commands a lot of monetary compensation, but it has been enough to pay the bills, do some traveling, enjoy live arts and sporting events and put some away for the future. More money would mean more of the latter three and a shorter trip to retirement.
ToL was my first live Broooooce; I was 19, one of 11 friends packed into two cars and one room at the LaQuinta Inn. Up the thread Brant did a good job capturing the feel of the opening, but I'll never forget the ease with which Bruce brought the band - and the crowd - from standing, stomping, shouting and dancing to just taking a collective breath and listening in community. I've never seen anyone do it better in the rock-pop idiom.
First chapter in a fascinating read: the Psychology of Money, Morgan Housel, is a chapter called "No One's Crazy. In short, it states the obvious: people from different generations, raised by different parents, who earned different incomes and held different values, in different parts of the world, born into different economies, with different job markets, with different incentives and different degrees of luck learn very different lessons. So all of us live life anchored to a different set of views and beliefs about money and how it works, that will literally differ from everyone else's. What seems crazy to you may make lots of sense to me, and vice versa. But in reality, neither of us is crazy.
I grew up in poverty, single-parent home, managed to sneak into a rich priviledged school because I had a more intelligent older brother and an entire roster of wealthy donors who put poor kids like me through their alma mater. I was surrounded by opulence, parking my buick void of a painted hood or roof next to newer BMWs. I lived in utter jealousy. Always having cash for lunch, full tanks of gas, huge houses. Lot of those kids didn't need to incur major debt for higher secondary education either. I took on a mortgage worth of debt, because I was raised to believe good school means good job, good life for family. But in actuality, I was investing and training to be someone's asset, and good money would come at the expense of time with my family, for which I'm even working. So for me, besides the health of my family and myself, the pursuit of wealth is greater than literally anything else.
Anyone who says money can't solve all your problems has never lived without it. It's a lot easier being depressed with a full belly and no creditors than it is starving and downing in debt. I started my own business, took the ultimate risk, because I finally learned that under America's current model, W-2 employees aren't meant to have anything nice unless they're willing to amass debt and trade all of their time for money, and for over two decades, I did that. Nice vaca? Put it on the credit card, we'll live low after and pay it off in half a year. We need a car - can't drive something unsafe, so gotta take out a loan to get something nicer, something newer. Need bigger house to accomodate growing family. It's all a system designed to trap your ass into W-2 employment, and it works like a charm.
I had to start my own business because everything from our laws to our tax codes favor business owners and corporations, whereas the individual is meant to live in debt, working 50-60 hr weeks, taking orders from bosses needing you to adopt this career as a lifestyle like they have, living HUSTLE CULTURE, all so that they can, maybe retire by the time they're 65, or dead. Our parents grew up living this religiously. My generation appears to be a mixed bag on it. Gen Z has seen enough it appears. There's hope.
You've seen my reactions here when Mixon takes a pay cut - it physically makes me sick. Yes, he'd be cut without it, but I don't think we appreciate just what he's sacrificing, for a game that's literally killing him. Doc said it best, money affords time and freedom. But it also offers your offspring a safer path through the jungle. For me, life is way too short to spend so much of it doing something that makes you unhappy, for a wage that's taxed at nearly 40% in some cases, all to build someone else's generational wealth, who won't be trading their time for money for much longer even if they still are now.
I don't want to spend my existence chasing dollars, but in America, we have prioritized dollars over individuals. It has it pros, it arguably has way more cons. And not everyone shares in today's gains. At the root of all our problems here - wealth inequality can explain virtually everything. Crime is directly proportional to poverty.
For me, money is vitality. If you don't agree, no worries, you're not crazy. But iMO we should prioritize it accordingly, we should talk about it more, as much as we do the weather, because treating money like a taboo topic only favors the people who have all of it.
I'd reached many of those same conclusions too. I also started my own business a year and a half ago for those reasons, and this one..... back when the 08 crisis hit, so many of the dads in the neighborhood I grew up in lost their jobs in their 50s, and never really got back to work near the same level. I don't want to be in a position where I can be downsized at that age or older. My risk is real. If I fail I'll be out of money and back applying for a W2. I don't golf anymore. I make 90% of my food at home. I don't do many things that cost money. I'm still going backwards some each month, but I'm getting there. Thank god I'd saved enough to try this.
We should definitely talk more about money and the injustices in the American economy, but, alas, as soon as you do it's "class warfare".
Ambitious Americans used to want to have a career like George Romney. Now they want to have a career like Mitt Romney.
And, how has this not been brought up yet? If you're an attractive 18-25 year old girl with a nice butt and smile, you can make tens of thousands of dollars a week online 'working from home' posting dancing videos, and thirst trap photos. Where is this going? Why would any girl want a real job?
Lastly, I don't think that all dollars earned have the same moral equivalency. There are a lot of extremely well compensated roles out there that actively harm society.
A reason I enjoy doing TML so much is bc of people like you, who always come through with thoughtful, smart reactions to what I post. Nice work.
I grew up in somewhat similar circumstances. Both parents were there. But only one of them took the job of parenting seriously. Nine kids, so money was tight. I passed the entrance exam to St X in the spring of 73. Tuition at the time was 1K per year. I could have worked my way through but then, as now, there was only so much I would do for money. I'm not sure how much happier I'd be today if I had been more ambitious. It seems to me that happiness comes and goes in pretty much the same pattern for the well off and the working stiff. But I enjoyed your perspective. It's a pity we all only get one shot at this game. It would be cool to try it both ways 🙂
$1,000 in 1973 dollars is roughly $6,900 in 2023 dollars. Something tells me St X is magnitudes more expensive than that today.
Housing prices, higher ed prices, medical costs..... no wonder a lot of younger Americans aren't having kids. And somewhere a boomer is saying that they worked their way through college, while leaving out that tuition was like $500 a semester.
Tunnel of Love is in my second Bruce tier along with Born in the USA. Both are equal parts great songs and filler, unlike the nonstop track by track winners that came before. But the great songs are indeed great, and the tour was awesome.
I’ve always considered time to be a precious asset well worth paying to acquire (my wife and I have neither cut the grass nor cleaned the house in 35 years). Retirement hasn’t changed that, just made me feel richer.
I would love to fly private if I had the $, but my sustainably minded daughter would never speak to me again if I became that much of a carbon dioxide generator.
Money does mean freedom to me. Especially as I get older. I can't do all the physical things I used to be able to do, so I can't get a job to back up my SSI or IRA. When it goes out now, it's out w/no return. That feels like a dark tunnel to me. I don't like to depend on others...but that is what single people have to deal with in life. Dangling participles.
My parents were penniless when they married after WWII. They became wealthy through hard work, obsessive saving, and compound interest. Given their Depression era childhood with the community reluctance to flaunt wealth, I don’t remember them ever expressing envy or comparing us to “rich people”. As you might imagine, though genetics or environment or whatever, it became my approach to money and life. Work hard, save everything you can, and invest wisely and carefully. I have lived in their shadow my whole life and give them all the credit.
It doesn’t bother me that wealth can be accumulated in America to unlimited levels because I believe it is what made us successful collectively. Others note that led to inequality that others can’t abide but it confirms in my mind the most likely path to success is economic freedom. We have a security net and plenty of regulation, but I know what poor looked like in the 1950’s and, even though it hasn’t disappeared, it looks a damn sight better now. Remember, it’s just my opinion, nothing else…
As for Boss albums, it has to be The Wild, The Innocent, and the E-Street Shuffle. Kitty, Wild Billy, Rosalita, and the sublime New York Serenade. Another one that changes my life.
Tunnel of Love is one of my favorite Bruce albums. It came out four months after I got married and it's themes of the mysteries of love coincided with the excitement and fear that comes with beginning a life together. Thirty six years later - still with my lovely bride - I recommended it to all three of my boys soon after their weddings.