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.

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.

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.

Whenever I fill out the job description I put ‘songwriter’, never ‘singer’ or ‘artist.’ Singers come and go.

I think the idea of a love song has changed. Most of the love songs we all loved as kids would be classified as funeral dirges now, you know, really super slow. I think nowadays the ballad has changed. It can have some up-tempo, some drums, some other things. ‘Forever’ would still be considered a ballad, I guess, but the tempo is probably more of a mid-tempo. The content is love song. I don’t know how to write anything else.

I work very hard at being the best musician I can be because I love it.

What I look for in concert is a connection with the audience.

A kiss that is never tasted, is forever and ever wasted.

I started out to become a jazz pianist; in the meantime I started singing and I sang the way I felt and that’s just the way it came out.

Listening to the Fifth Symphony of Ralph Vaughan Williams is like staring at a cow for 45 minutes.

Every symphony, for example, is a sonata for orchestra; every string quartet is a sonata for four strings; every concerto a sonata for a solo instrument and orchestra.

The weird thing about bass is the simplest stuff to do is the hardest.

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

All a musician can do is to get closer to the source.

There is something about music that keeps its distance even at the moment that it engulfs us. It is at the same time outside and away from us and inside and part of us. In one sense it dwarfs us, and in another we master it. We are led on and on, and yet in some strange way we never lose control.

Music should never be harmless.

Beiderbecke took out a silver cornet, put it to his lips and blew a phrase. The sound came out like a girl saying ‘yes.’

A young tenor player was complaining to me that Coleman Hawkins made him nervous. Man, I told him Hawkins was supposed to make him nervous! Hawkins has been making other sax players nervous for forty years!

I bought my first electric guitar when I moved to Memphis; a Gibson with a DeArmond pickup which I used with a small Gibson amplifier.

Just give a drum roll, announce my name and I come out and sing. I have a contract that says I’m a singer. So I sing.