About Brian

Here you will find a collection of interviews and news articles about your favorite singer and songwriter, Brian McKnight!

Latest Interviews & Articles :

>> McKnight Turns '10' With Warner Bros.

>> REVIEW; McKnight expertly ignites romance

>> McKnight's music is the love of his life

>> Yahoo - It's His Turn - Brian McKnight Interview

>> Brian McKnight Back at Number One (AskMen.com Interview)

>> Brian McKnight Hitmaking Balladeer Keeps Romance Alive With Music - Interview

>> Soul singer Brian McKnight sounds off on today's music

>> BRIAN MCKNIGHT On Fame, Family and Female Fans

>> Brian McKnight: single again: award-winning singer begins a new life

Brian McKnight Notable Quotes

Brian McKnight Quotes:
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All they see is the moment in time that they see, the song, the video, part of the show that they see. They don't get the everyday person, so whenever they do see it, they're surprised. That's the part I don't like; it's so unfortunate that they don't get to see that.
Brian McKnight

As I've gotten older, now I've really got to back that up with record sales. Anytime showed me that I could still have some of those elements I wanted, but you still have to come with hit after hit after hit.
Brian McKnight

Back in college, when I got kicked out of school, I was still in school, I'd just written the song that got me my record deal. If I hadn't gotten kicked out of school I wouldn't be where I am now. Three months after that, I got my record deal and the rest is history.
Brian McKnight

Because I know how to play jazz and that's where my heart is, I need to come back to something simple again to satisfy my integrity. The average person may not understand.
Brian McKnight

Being a musician, you want to be able to do the hardest stuff there is. People would think it's classical, but in classical, it's all on the page and the difficulty is keeping up with the music.
Brian McKnight

By 17, I had a whole band that would go in and play. It was called Spontaneous Inventions, after a Bobby McFerrin album.
Brian McKnight

Directors are there to tell you what they're not getting from you on a daily basis. The thing that I love about acting-when you listen to pop music there's not a lot that stands out. But there are still great music and movies that touch the pulse of America.
Brian McKnight

Each individual song has its own thing. Some songs are really personal. Others are pure imagination.
Brian McKnight

Every little kid that steps on the court or the field has aspirations to go pro. I think being a pro basketball player is the best job. The thing I had to realize was that I can't do every dream that I have.
Brian McKnight

Everything I have has a sports connotation to it. If I play Ping-Pong, I want to win more than anything.
Brian McKnight

He knows I rip him off every day. He's the godfather for me. Nobody can say they aren't influenced by what Stevie Wonder has done.
Brian McKnight

I brought them home, sat and played with them. I didn't know that would lead to being a producer. People say, 'You do everything yourself, that's selfish.' It's not that, it's just faster for me to do it myself.
Brian McKnight

I don't care how small the game. I want to win.
Brian McKnight

I don't labor all day over something. I don't have to go through my thesaurus thinking, 'There must be another way to say this.' I try to write conversationally. There's a formula to it, and very rarely do I deviate from that.
Brian McKnight

I just do what I do and hope it's accepted by the public at large. It's different from when Marvin Gaye and Stevie revolutionized what music was 25 years ago. Now there's all this technology that's available to everyone. It's tough to be ahead of anyone.
Brian McKnight

I just happen to be a vehicle for the song. The song is the most important thing to me. Every now and then I hear a song from 20 years ago, and I won't remember the singer, but I remember the words. That's how I approach what I do.
Brian McKnight

I keep these songs in my head until I get behind the microphone. I never spend more than 30 or 40 minutes singing the vocal or it will sound mechanical. There are always mistakes, but it's about feeling more than being perfect.
Brian McKnight

I think it surprises people, but I live for that. It makes me regular, human, grounded. I've developed relationships with those people in Venice.
Brian McKnight

I think that at least with that, there was nothing overtly necessarily sexual about it. No more so than grabbing my crotch onstage or simulating sex with a girl I've grabbed out of the audience. We decided to see how it would go.
Brian McKnight

I think that now taking it slow, and not hurrying... I think the right thing will be presented to me at the right time.
Brian McKnight

I think that now, I have it down to a science. I can turn it on and off when I need to. A lot of people think this happened overnight, but I've been at this 15 years. Also it's important that I write the songs too, which is different from seeing a lyric sheet from someone else.
Brian McKnight

I think that the world would need to hear some of this other stuff. When I was younger, I wanted to show everybody everything I could do, and that's why the music sounded the way it did.
Brian McKnight

I think they can co-exist. You don't have to put one down for another. I've been bitten by the acting bug, and where it takes me, it won't take away from the music.
Brian McKnight

I try to be home for my kids to do their homework and I try to work when they're asleep. I had to say, 'What's really important?' To be around, to be there for the important things that happen. To make my recording life a schedule.
Brian McKnight

I used to play pianos in bars. You know in hotels, you'd see guys playing piano with a snifter? That was me, with a painted-on mustache. I was about 15.
Brian McKnight

I wanted to put jazz on the record, all the loves of music that I had on the record, so I could show people I was ahead of my 19 years. It may have been over the heads of some people.
Brian McKnight

I was a nerd academically. But I was also an athlete and a musician. I never wanted to be shut out of any situation. I think it was that more than anything.
Brian McKnight

I was like a kid in a candy store. All I ever wanted to do was hear what the songs in my head would sound like on tape. You go nuts.
Brian McKnight

I was playing the record for radio stations and looking at the reactions people showed. I would think, 'Wow, this is a song I wrote and they like it.
Brian McKnight

I watch my contemporaries, and they love to live in the studio and I don't. I have a life. I treat it as a 9-to-5. I try to create something new every day, and then I get on with my life.
Brian McKnight

I'm living this dream and I get to have the chance to hang out and play with those guys. I think I'm doing the thing I was put on this earth to do.
Brian McKnight

I've been going out there for years. You get the crowd out there. Great Sunday-afternoon thing. I'm very competitive. I leave all the celeb stuff on the sidelines. I'm out there to play.
Brian McKnight

I've had other musicians play on my records, but I do like to be able to say I do it myself. That's not the motivating factor. And we incorporate it live, too. Right there at that moment, that's what I'm feeling.
Brian McKnight

In upstate New York, I'll see elderly people with grandchildren. I just try to write great songs and whatever category they put them in, cool.
Brian McKnight

It was very difficult to find people with the same musical taste. It didn't alienate me because I was into everything.
Brian McKnight

It's a way of challenging myself. I know I'm going to go to work tonight, so I know I better have something to go win there with. I never go to the studio without something to work on.
Brian McKnight

It's exciting because you start something brand-new. To learn something about it. Now, in music, I'm not that open to what others think because I think I know it all. So acting, I have something new to learn.
Brian McKnight

It's just exciting to be part of something that is brand-new.
Brian McKnight

It's that kind of stuff is just not commercial. When you're dealing with pop music, you're dealing with people who are not musically sophisticated. Not a dis, but it's just the same thing to it. That's what they've been fed.
Brian McKnight

It's very rare that I write the songs for someone; I write because that's what I do.
Brian McKnight

Jazz is all about improvisation and it's about the moment in time, doing it this way now, and you'll never do it this way twice. I've studied the masters. Why would I want to play ball after the guys who sit on a bench? I want to play like Michael Jordan.
Brian McKnight

Just give me a little time. And thus was so. You can't think about it. Can't let them get you off the path. You have to be true to yourself.
Brian McKnight

Lionel Richie told me forget about the critics. But if you come back with hit after hit, you don't have to worry about anything.
Brian McKnight

Live, you get the feedback. But when it's just you in the studio, you have to have them relate to you and you don't have them to give it back to you. That's the premise I start from. If the other people in the room feel it, then I feel it too.
Brian McKnight

Maybe I do have a future writing these songs because I see this reaction.' It's a scary thing even now. You're really just dealing with your own voice. To me, I'll love everything I do, but you don't know what anyone else's take will be on it.
Brian McKnight

Most of the stuff I learned to play, I learned in high school. I had a band in high school, a jazz-fusion thing, and I was the keyboard player. I was interested in how the instruments worked and the theory behind playing with them.
Brian McKnight

Music is the artform that gets to you most because there's no visual. Nothing in the world can touch you like that. That's what jazz did for me when I was coming up. If I can do that, then I can do something simple.
Brian McKnight

My father taught us to adapt to any environment-be involved with things because you want to and be good at it, as opposed to being an outsider.
Brian McKnight

People say, 'Don't you get writer's block?' And I say, 'No, if I don't have anything, I'm not going in. I'll sit with my guitar until something comes.'
Brian McKnight

Playing drums and programming drums as a drummer is different than programming drums as a keyboardist.
Brian McKnight

Stevie didn't use the technology to drive the song. He used it to enhance. I use the tools to further my work, I don't use my work to further the tools.
Brian McKnight

That's a really interesting question that's posed all the time: 'Can we get back to this? Can music get back to that?' I don't know. Music changes day to day, and it's hard to get a hold on what will be the next big thing.
Brian McKnight

That's the same thing with piano players-Thelonious Monk, the guys that are really deep. He will give you the same kind of brain meltdown that Rachmaninoff did for the kid in Shine.
Brian McKnight

The guy comes up to the plate, there's always a chance where he can get a grand slam and everybody forgets about all the times he missed.
Brian McKnight

The only problem is to see how to top that. It was just a way to introduce the next part of the show; it gave the women a sort of fantasy-booth situation and it worked. It could have backfired and everyone hated it, but we took a chance.
Brian McKnight

There are ways to get it overnight, but if you want to be here 10, 15 years, you should learn how to play and have a foundation. If you can write songs, you won't always look this way or sound this way, but you'll have a foundation, if you can create something.
Brian McKnight

There's a place in New York where they have an open mic on Sundays. One night Stevie was there. He came up onstage with me and said, 'Can you sing 'Anytime' for me, because that's my favorite song?' That was a huge compliment.
Brian McKnight

They see so many people, who are successful-I had to learn to play on a piano, a guitar, not a patch.
Brian McKnight

Today I may be in a bad mood, and they see the worst Brian of my life, and they'll never see me again. We have bad days, bad times-everybody does. And I hate disappointing anybody in that respect. It's a catch-22, I guess.
Brian McKnight

What you get, at least from me, when you grow up singing in church, you learn how to get all the emotion you can out of what you're singing about. And how it relates to your audience. Because you're trying to touch people. I haven't changed.
Brian McKnight

When did I feel it? Wow. Probably about the time my first record came out in '91.
Brian McKnight

When it's your chance to step up to the plate, just hit it out of the park, and everybody will forget about everything that came before.
Brian McKnight

When you write that many songs, only one in 20 is one you'd like to hear on record or that will be commercially viable enough. I will write a large volume of songs, but I have a formula. Every now and then I come up with a wild card.
Brian McKnight

Whenever I fill out the job description I put 'songwriter,' never 'singer' or 'artist.' Singers come and go.
Brian McKnight

Whenever I get behind a mic I remember somebody might hear what I'm saying, need to be comforted. I try to make it personal so the listener can take it personal, too. You learn that from being an actor, too.
Brian McKnight

You can't listen to what people who aren't musical have to say. When Anytime was released, I had bad reviews, and at first I was hurt. Your songs are like your children. You don't want to hear, 'Your kid is ugly.' But I knew the record was good and it would sell.
Brian McKnight

You have to get all of your musical frustration out and then you come back to being simple again. It my not be a hit, but it satisfies the musical person in me.
Brian McKnight

You have to sell what you're doing. That's the kind of professionalism people expect when they hear you live.
Brian McKnight

HipOnline.com (interview)

by Charlie Craine
Published: August.11.2003

WebLink: http://www.hiponline.com/artist/music/m/mcknight_brian/100403.html

A one-on-one interview with a legend in waiting, Brian McKnight.

How is life treating you?

Good. Trying to multi-task all this Kobe Bryant stuff on TV, do interviews and keep on top of everything.

The first thing that comes to mind every time a record comes out from you I wonder ‘how does he do it' and ‘what motivates him still?'

Every time someone comes up to me how one of my songs were used for a wedding or how it got them through a tough time or that they used it to make one of their children. It's great to be sort of voyeuristic in those people's lives without being there. It's wonderful to be the soundtrack of those people's lives. When I hear that I want to write more songs. It's a great feeling.

Who was the soundtrack of your life?

There are so many. I don't really have a specific artist that is the soundtrack of my life or remember the song I heard when I broke up with my first girlfriend. For me I use songs to learn how to play instruments. I love Stevie [Wonder], Michael McDonald, James Ingram, and The Winans. But basically I learned those songs and their structures. People ask me what I do and I say ‘I write songs'. I sing, yeah that is great and good but over the weekend I was away and didn't have a cd player in the rental car I had and listened to the radio and thought ‘wow, this is what has happened to music'. It doesn't matter anymore if you can sing or not. But songs will always be written and will be part of people's lives and I knew that when I was a teenager and I wanted to know what it meant to write songs and what to figure out what that was and didn't know that at fifteen. I didn't know it would end up being a career. Its kind of like when you are a kid and you get a toy that is indestructible, you find a way to break it. (Laughs)

It is a gift that you have to cultivate. You have to be born able to do it if you do it the way I do it. But if you are just a lyricist you can learn how to do that. I think anyone can write lyrics. I think when it comes to constructing songs you have to have it in you when you are born.

Carole King and Gerry Goffin would sit in Tin Pan Alley sit and just write all day and crank out hits. Is that something you do or does the song have to strike you?

For me there is no time or day or special circumstance for a song to be written. I've been able to have a blueprint of chord changes that I have been able to pull from. You would think that because there are only 88 keys on a piano that there is a finite number of ways but it is infinite because of the combinations. But you can write fifteen songs with the same chord changes. Look at the ‘50s all the songs had the same chord changes; it was paint by the numbers. Once you realize that, the subject that I write about which is love and relationships I can never run out of material for that.

Not to get personal, but did you write the album U Turn during or after your divorce?

I wrote this entire record after my wife and I split.

Does going into the studio take you away from your everyday life?

I use the everyday life as fuel for the songs. If I didn't live I'd have nothing to write about. There is only so much imagination and living vicariously through other people you can do. After going through everything I have from splitting up and being alone and once I figured that out all these songs showed up. I don't wear my heart on my sleeve so I put them into the songs.

You always hear about someone that has the sophomore slump because they couldn't live a regular life after their first record yet you keep on.

I went through that on my second record. I thought I knew everything when the first record came out and then I made a record that I wanted to make instead of thinking about what people will expect. I didn't look at the barometer of where music was. From 1992-1995 was the longest time I went without a record and now it's about every eighteen months or so. I was still thinking about, in 1990 when I made the first record, things I needed to say. I think it is always a good thing if you can rebound from it. I came back with Anytime. There were tough times from 1995 to 1997. I thought the material was better for the second album than the first but never broke through.

As a fan I'd say you are getting better with each album. How?

I think after Anytime I started thinking more about what fans wanted from me more than I thought what I needed to give. I think I close in on that more and more with each record.

Is there any artist out there that you say ‘if I were spoke in the same breathe as…' what artist would you see as being an honor to be mentioned with?

There is only one person really even though there are a million successful acts out there, I think Stevie Wonder. If only I could have one-third of that. To have decade after decade after decade to keep people listening to you and have kids find you and know who you are and respect you. For me the biggest thing isn't necessarily the best thing in the world to be completely successful without being respected by your peers and the general public in general and to stick around for a long time. The fifteen years I have been around it is so fickle and just when I think this is it I can still feel that I'm at the height of my popularity without having my best record sales.

Do you think your music continues to hold up because you tap a universal thing such as love? Your songs don't have that thing like some artists in the past where you can say ‘that was 1985' because of the beat or the sound of the time?

Exactly, it's a good thing and a bad thing though. There are some other people who have been able to change with the time and have big hits of the moment. I think when you hear the radio it's all about right now. The people who program radio aren't thinking ‘man we have to play songs that are hits for now until 2023'. It's not like that anymore. I grew up in the seventies and eighties and those styles will always come back and people will continue to bite off of those styles. I'm really concerned that from the middle of the ‘90s what are kids going to be able to reach back and get a hold of in the 2020s? I think we are getting to the end of the creative process. I don't know if you ever saw Demolition Man the movie but in that movie the only thing they played on the radio were old jingles because, I never thought of it at the time the movie came out, but at a certain point we are going to exhaust how much more creative we can be and we are going to go back to something stupid or silly to listen to on the radio. It's wild to think we are at that point.

I'd like to think that is what people do. It's unfortunate that people who dictate what music gets to the public don't understand what they are doing to the business.

I always hope a great song will stick out regardless of what is hip that moment.

I think it does but what happens is the numbers of those songs that they allow to peek through has diminished. There maybe one or two a year as apposed to one or two a month. It's July now and I'm afraid to see what song they call the song of the year.

Is it crazy to think about the big differences in the ages of your fans from teens to people in their later lives?

It is. When I get on stage I really see it. It's unfortunate but I can't be there when people buy the record. I don't know if they are like me but I listen to a record immediately when I get into the car in the parking lot. It would be nice to be a fly on the wall even to hear the bad, what they don't like. I can pretty much tell what they are going to like but then I wonder about all the little things I do for me and wonder if they will like it.

Are you overly in control of the production?

(Laughs) I am in complete autonomous control. (We both laugh) I have always been since the beginning. There are two people I look to my manager and my Bruce Carbone at the label. Those are two people that I trust but at the end of the day I can still say ‘no'.

I hear artists say it is hard to self produce after they have attempted it because they don't know how to be objective. How is it for you? Hard?

Not at all, I look at my job like other people look at theirs. I have it down to such a science that my engineer knows that when I'm in the middle of working on a record I'm coming in at 8 o'clock. I use technology to make me efficient, not to make up for what I can't do. (Laughs) There is no song that I have done in the last ten years that took me more than three or four hours to start and complete. That is mostly because I'm prepared when I get there. Most people use their time in the studio to work on songs, but I do most of my writing at home. I don't go to the studio until I have something to record.

I don't demo at all. I make masters from the very first time I go to the studio until I go home.

You should be doing more producing.

I do an amount of that, not as much as I people want me to. Obviously I did things on Justin's album and NSYNC and Alicia Keys, but I don't do a whole lot.

You'd be saving them a lot of time and money.

(Laughs) Well you know.

Do you write a lot of songs or just what you need for a record?

I write a lot. There are thirteen songs on U Turn and I wrote fifty.

Wow, that is a lot.

Yeah.

When are we going to get them?

It depends. There is a lot of speculation about what will happen with the rest of these tunes.

You have a position in life that many can only dream of. What do you dream of?

The dream is to eliminate the middle man and let fans get the music directly from me and without the responsibilities of having to get it to radio and do videos. I think that process causes the fans to not get what the artist is truly trying to do. What we are missing now a days we are missing the wanting. When I first started making records you went away for a while and you would wait until the fans would want you to come back. We make the records so fast now that while you are finishing the last one they want another one.

+ Charlie Craine
Published: August.11.2003