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.

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.

I’m not worried about legacy. I don’t even know what that actually means. I don’t think anyone knows. I hope at some point in my career when my name is mentioned, someone will say “Oh yeah he has a good song!” I’d be happy with that.

I kind of hate the fact that people are always trying to put you into a category. I hate walls, and I hate boundaries. I don’t like that. I listen to everything.

People don’t like when you point out to them and remind them that they’re not very smart.

There’s only one thing that everyone in this world has in common: whether you want to love somebody and you want to be loved in return.

My dark sound could be heard across a room clearer than somebody with a reedy sound. It had more projection. My sound always seemed to fill a room.

Art [Blakey] would take young people with a potential and help them develop a voice as a player and as a writer.

Music is the mediator between the spiritual and the sensual life.

We all have idols. Play like anyone you care about, but try to be yourself while you’re doing so.

You only go around once and this ain’t no rehearsal.

Music gave me the energy to revise, revive myself; renew, rebirth myself. It was a palliative, a relief.

Play the way you’d like to be and soon you’ll be the way you play.

I let my body play what’s in my heart. I play life instead of notes. I play what I lived.

I would like you to know, I am a doctor of music.

Hot can be cool and cool can be hot and each can be both. But hot or cool man, Jazz is Jazz.

Jazz is not gonna be a dinosaur and stay around in one form.

You don’t know what love is, until you’ve learned the meaning of the blues, until you’ve loved a love you’ve had to lose.

I have music inside me and I’m very lucky to be able to play music and that’s the way that I try to do it.

Well if I could play like Wynton Marsalis, I wouldn’t play like Wynton.

You’ve heard me call myself a bluesman and a blues singer. I call myself a blues singer, but you ain’t never heard me call myself a blues guitar man. Well, that’s because there’s been so many can do it better’n I can, play the blues better’n me. I think a lot of them have told me things, taught me things.