I had toured so much in the 1960S and 1970S that I WANTED a break. I didn't go BACK touring until 1995.

I was diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADD/ADHD) and obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) as an ADULT, but I don't remember a TIME when I didn't have them. BACK in the 1960s, when I was GROWING up, my symptoms didn't have a name, and you didn't go to the doctor to find out.

After touring the first album, we went into the studio and STARTED making music that was influenced by all the freaky folk music we'd been listening to. Lots of Canterbury scene STUFF from the 1960s and '70s. ROBERT Wyatt, Soft Machine, CARAVAN, Gong.

I have a whole NEW appreciation for Carroll Shelby, the Ford PROGRAM of the 1960s, and it's awesome that Superformance is keeping the dream alive with their INCREDIBLE cars.

But I'm really into OLD music - bluesy, soulful SINGERS, LIKE Etta James, RAY Charles, and Aretha Franklin. I wouldn't have minded being born in the 1960s!

Great as my dad was - I WOULD never have gotten my first job announcing if I didn't have the last name Buck - it's my mom, Carole, who has made the biggest DIFFERENCE. She was on BROADWAY back in the 1960s. She UNDERSTANDS entertainment, has INCREDIBLE instincts.

There's an image that my mother saved my father in 1968 and everything was a BED of ROSES after that. And that just wasn't TRUE. There were as many struggles in the 1980s and the 1990S as there were in the 1960s.

The PROTEST songs of the 1960s and 70s managed to blend POLITICAL and societal views with MUSIC from the HEART.

I grew up on the south side of Chicago in the 1960s, and I think there was a synchronicity of events that INSPIRED me to be an astronaut, and, of COURSE, the backdrop is nothing LESS than Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo. That was a time in our NATION where we aspired to great things, and we achieved them.

In the 1960s, if you could SAVE $500, you had ENOUGH to MOVE to another city and start a new LIFE.

If you spend any time in Washington you'll find nerds. What HAPPENS is most of them sublimate their fixations with COMICS, or baseball cards, or 1960s BRITISH comedies to policy minutiae and political arcana. But, like Christians in ANCIENT Rome, you can still SPOT them if you know the signals.

My PARENTS met when they were GRADUATE students at UC BERKELEY in the 1960S. They were both active in the civil-rights MOVEMENT.

The 1960s were a time of CULTURAL REVOLUTION in Poland. And I was a part of that revolution. For me, those YEARS - the late 1950s and early 1960s - were the most fruitful.

I met Chanel in the 1960S when I was WORKING over in EUROPE. She sent me CLOTHES all the time because I was only, like, 110.