Brian McKnight

Brian McKnight

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McKNIGHT IN SHINING ARMOR
Poetic Ballads and Hip-Hop Beats Equal Sophisticated Cool on Brian McKnight's 'Back at One'
With smooth vocals and a performance style that transcends in-your-face raunchiness to achieve subtle sexiness and real emotion, 30-year-old songwriter-pianist-singer Brian McKnight carves a course that other R&B crooners, including youngsters like Usher and Tyrese, may want to emulate when they grow up. McKnight's double-platinum ANYTIME, released in 1997, combined R&B smoothness and hip-hop bravado on songs that melded open declarations of sexual and romantic yearning with compelling dance grooves. Following up with BACK AT ONE, he offers poetic ballads and hip-hop beats mixed with acoustic guitar flourishes, all the while exuding a self-assurance that recalls the iconic cool of Luther Vandross and McKnight's vocal hero Al Jarreau. Still, make no mistake: on BACK AT ONE, McKnight is his own man. Here, bn.com's Marie Elsie St. Léger talks to a soulman on the rise.

barnesandnoble.com: BACK AT ONE is your fifth album. What did you do differently this time?

Brian McKnight: I really used stuff right out the heart this time -- way more than the situational stuff I was talking about on the last record. I think that's what shows through, and I think that's what people have come to expect.

bn.com: Of the music you listen to, what elements find their way into your song lyrics or into the production of the songs?

BM: There's obviously a lot of Stevie Wonder in what I do, and there's a lot of James Ingram -- I listen to that stuff all the time. But the stuff that I'm really hardcore in love with very rarely makes it onto my records.

bn.com: What kind of music is that?

BM: Straight-ahead jazz, like you would not believe.

bn.com: What are some jazz records you're listening to now?

BM: I've got Art Tatum CDs, and I've got opera CDs. I spent some time during this record woodshedding a lot of Miles [Davis] and doing some comparisons between Wynton [Marsalis] and Miles, and then some John Coltrane and some Theolonious Monk, really getting into it. The other side of me is very much Steely Dan and David Sanborn, Gino Vanelli, Elvis Presley. Even before that -- you could go back to Ambrosia and the Doobie Brothers. To be really musical, you can't just deal with R&B to be credible.

bn.com: The video for "Back at One" -- which shows you surviving a plane crash and returning to your loved ones -- is very sexy. Is that a conscious part of your image?

BM: Actually, that was the last thing I was trying to do. I think the most important thing in that video was the message that, even though this very tragic thing is happening, I'm still in my mind letting the person that I'm in love with know that I love them.

bn.com: What do you hope old fans and new converts will hear when they listen to this album?

BM: Hopefully, they'll see that I'm a songwriter who can continue to come up with new and wonderful ideas to make them think about their own situations. That's all I could ever hope for.