Brian McKnight

Very rarely artists come in on their own terms and get to do everything – whatever they want…it doesn’t really matter about talent in the beginning. Talent is what keeps you here, getting in the door is just about how you start in the music business.

I thought that true love was a just fairytale but I have it and it’s pretty amazing.

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.

I’ve always wanted to be a stand-up comic on some levels as well and I know I can play and sing but when people see me and say, “I didn’t know you were so funny… You’re like a real entertainer,” that’s what I like more than all the other accolades.

I am a writer – that is what I am before being a performer or musician. I love waking up in the morning and then going to sleep that night with something that did not exist.

In my family on my mother’s side we’re all church musicians first so I don’t remember a time when we weren’t doing something musical. My brothers and I sang in a little quartet, my aunts and uncles sang and my grandfather was a minister of music in our church, so walking and talking was like doing music for us.

Always be a first-rate version of yourself, instead of a second-rate version of someone else.

The way I look at it, they’re all part of my musical diary, and I can listen to any one of them and it will bring up memories of what was going on at that time.

I never wanted to be like other blues singers. I might like hearing them play, but I’ve never wanted to be anyone other than myself. There are a few people that I’ve wished I could play like, but when I tried, it didn’t work.

If I’m not a jazz player all the time, I’ve at least been cued in to what I do by jazz.

Creativity is more than just being different. Anybody can plan weird; that’s easy. What’s hard is to be as simple as Bach. Anyone can make the simple complicated. Creativity is making the complicated simple.

If you are not doing what you love, you are wasting your time!

There’s a sadness to all kinds of music if you want to hear it. There’s also happiness to it if you want to hear it.

Les is an old friend of mine. He gave me this special white Les Paul – he wound the pickups himself – for my birthday, first time I met him. I play everything from heavy metal to blues to jazz on it. He just hit it right on the head when he designed the Les Paul. I like it better than most girlfriends I’ve had. The godfather of rock ‘n’ roll, I call him. Without him, none of us would have a job.

Anyone who doesn’t give [his debut album, The College Dropout] a perfect score is lowering the integrity of the magazine

You compose because you want to somehow summarize in some permanent form your most basic feelings about being alive, to set down some sort of permanent statement about the way it feels to live now, today.

[on Glastonbury] I started off the show and I completely messed up the music. And me, as you can imagine by this phone call, I’m a bit of a perfectionist. So it really put me into a slightly depressed state.

The Jazz Age became less and less an affair of youth. The sequel was like a children’s party taken over by the elders.

One of the great moments of my life was when I could write musician on my passport.

The first time I heard Bird play, it hit me right between the eyes.

Monk taught me more about music composition than anyone else on 52nd Street.