Brian McKnight

I didn’t think my career would last this long, and it’s still going.

I’ll always write music. Whether I release a record, whether I let the public hear it or not, I’m always writing music.

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.

Jazz is about improvisation and the moment in time, doing it this way now and you’ll never do it this way twice.

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 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.

To this day, no one has come up with a set of rules for originality. There aren’t any.

Creativity and artistic endeavors have a mission far beyond just making music for the sake of music.

One shouldn’t be in the habit of quoting oneself.

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 remember going to sleep many nights with a Gibson catalog, dreaming about getting a Les Paul. I finally did, with a loan from my Dad. It’s a really heavy instrument. But it plays like butter. I met Les backstage at a show once. Jeff Beck made me play ‘Flight of the Bumblebee’ for Les, which was a little embarrassing. He changed history, big-time.

I like to know for whom I’m writing – it makes the composition easier to do.

Albert King wasn’t my brother in blood, but he sure was my brother in Blues!

Musicians have a really big part to play in spreading messages because they’re able to reach a large portion of people on an emotional level. Artists reach people at their heart; it’s the only time we meet in one place and put our differences aside. When you’re in a forum listening to music, all you feel in that moment is love and the understanding.

When you’re on stage you have a very strange knowledge of what the audience is. It isn’t exactly a sound – it’s a hum, like the streets.

Sound is the first thing that we tune into.

The first time I ever had to go overseas for music was to play the Royal Festival Hall in London, singing in a tribute to Ella Fitzgerald, and that week was insane: Thursday I rehearse with the orchestra; Friday I sing two songs in front of 2,500 people, which I have never done before; and the next day I go to Abbey Road to record with Herbie Hancock; and then I am playing a pub in south London somewhere, and nobody cares because London have lost some sporting match; and then I go home and I’m standing in front of my washing machine, putting my unmentionables into the dryer, and in that instant, I just looked at myself and said ‘This life is going to be strange’.

You know the actor John Garfield? In one movie he walked up to this train station, the ticket booth, and the guy says, ‘Yes, where are you going?’ And he says, ‘I want a ticket to nowhere.’ I thought: that’s it. The freedom to do that. I want a ticket to nowhere.

They’re not particular about whether you’re playing a flatted fifth or a ruptured 129th as long as they can dance to it.

[on Django Reinhardt] By far the most astonishing guitar player ever … Django was quite superhuman, there’s nothing normal about him as a person or a player

If a literary man puts together two words about music, one of them will be wrong.