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.

There’s no substitute to being successful on an actual chart.

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.

I’m creating music – it doesn’t matter if anyone else likes it.

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.

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.

The better it gets, the fewer of us know it.

The drummer; he inspired me to play like no one else I have ever met.

Jazz came to America three hundred years ago in chains.

I can tell whether a person can play just by the way he stands …If they act too hip, you know they can’t play shit.

I loved the feeling that I got singing.

I like what I hear other guys doing, but the thing that really attracts me is melodic playing.

As far back as I can remember, singing was in my blood. My parents loved music, and I loved to sing. I was scatting at an early age.

As long as I can say what it is that I need to say, then I’ll fit whatever I’m trying to say around a melody.

Everything I’ve ever done was out of fear of being mediocre.

The Blues and Jazz will live forever. So will the Delta and the Big Easy.

There’s only two types of music. The stuff you can write down and the stuff you can’t. The stuff that you can’t write down is Jazz. Everything else is Polka.

Music is my mistress and she plays second fiddle to no one.

I used to play a place in Twist, Arkansas… It used to get quite cold in Twist. And they used to take something that looked like a big garbage pail and set it in the middle of the floor, half-fill it with kerosene. They’d light that fuel and that’s what we’d use for heat… But this particular night, two guys started to fighting and one of them knocked the other one over onto this container. When they did it spilled on the floor. Now, it was already burning so when it spilled it looked like a river of fire. Everybody ran for the front door including yours truly. But when I got on the outside then I realized that I’d left the guitar inside. I went back for it. The building was a wooden building and it was burning so fast that when I got my guitar it started to collapse around me. So I almost lost my life trying to save the guitar. But the next morning we found that these two guys who were fighting were fighting about a lady. I never did meet the lady but I learned that her name was Lucille. So I named my guitar Lucille to remind me not to do a thing like that again.

To play without passion is inexcusable.

If your dreams don’t scare you they’re not big enough!