Brian McKnight

I am at my core a singer/songwriter a la James Taylor or a la Billy Joel. It’s not that I don’t want to work with people, but I do just love doing my own thing.

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 am just like all the jerks and idiots you know. I am just a guy that watches sports all day.

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.

I don’t really look at my career in terms of highlights and low lights. I think I’m at this place right now and to be at this place right now I’ve had to go through many obstacles and lots of highs and lows and for me it’s about the entire journey.

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

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

The genius of our country is improvisation, and jazz reflects that. It’s our great contribution to the arts.

You can have tone and technique but without originality you ain’t really nowhere. Gotta be original.

Music is the only language in which you cannot say anything sarcastic.

Once you start collecting records you learn more and more about Jazz and Blues.

Life is not about finding our limitations, it’s about finding our infinity.

You hear about the Duke Ellingtons, the Jimmie Luncefords, and the Fletcher Hendersons, but people sometimes forget that jazz was not only built in the minds of the great ones, but on the backs of the ordinary ones.

Jazz affirms the noblest aspirations of character, individual discipline, perseverance and innovation.

Jazz is the only music in which the same note can be played night after night, but differently each time.

I’m not thinking about what needs to be on the radio. I’m not thinking about anything other than – I’m just going to let this music come out of me and not have any sort of preconceived notion of what I should do. I’m just going to do it.

It isn’t where you came from, its where you’re going that counts.

If you find a note tonight that sounds good, play the same damn note every night!

Jazz music is our original American culture.

What’s tied Jazz together is its foundation in the Blues, a reliance on group interplay and the unique phenomenon of spontaneous improvisation.

People may say I can’t sing, but no one can ever say I didn’t sing.