At the airport awaiting a flight, the man on the other end of the phone line sounds buoyant, self-assured and totally in command of his career. It’s a cool confidence that, in a nutshell, defines the veteran soulful singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist, Brian McKnight.
It’s been a while, but with new album, More Than Words, McKnight serves up his 15th studio album and reflects on a career spanning more than 20 years.
PLAY Listen to Brian McKnight's More Than Words
Track Listing
In an ever-changing music industry, McKnight notes that these days, creating new records is less about the actual album sales and more about getting people to see him on tour.
“I’m in the touring business: I do 100 to 120 shows a year,” he says. “I travel nine months out of the year. It’s great that after 20-something years that people are still coming out to see me. That’s the business I’m in.”
Lead single “Sweeter” is vintage McKnight — heartfelt songwriting coupled with a syrupy smooth voice. And today, even after millions of albums sold and countless award nominations, he notes the creative process hasn’t actually changed much since his self-titled debut back in 1992.
“It still holds the same allure to me when it did when I was 17,” McKnight says, of still creating music. “I’ll always do that. Whether or not I make and release records I’m not sure, but there’s enough going on in my life that there will always be fuel for material. I am a writer — that is what I am before being a performer or musician. I love waking up in the morning and then going to sleep that night with something that did not exist.”
Outside of collaborations with people such as singer-songwriter Colbie Caillat, More That Words is a family affair of sorts, McKnight notes, featuring his sons on production and instrumentation throughout the album. Overall, making the project was about keeping things relatively simple, he offers.
“I don’t come up with a whole concept. I just write songs,” he says. “I’m at a point at my life where I want to mean the things that I say. I’m not going to say them again until I actually mean them. That’s where I am. I don’t want headaches and I’m being honest and that’s made my life so much more simple.”
He’s hesitant to even call the album an R&B record; genre labels or categories are things that McKnight was never about.
“I just write,” he explains. “I come from a time where people weren’t so compartmentalized. You just made music. 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.”
That said, the very concept of R&B as it exists today is something that he challenges.
“When I think R&B I’m thinking James Brown, I’m thinking Wilson Pickett and along those lines. It’s a very 1960s term. I think nowadays it’s a hip-hop infused kind of … I don’t even know what to call it. I create soul music. And I don’t even mean soul music in the sense of black music, I mean music from and for the soul.”
Speaking of labels, McKnight created a bit of a stir last year when he teamed up with Funny or Die for the “If You’re Ready to Learn (How Your P*ssy Works)” video. It was intended as a parody of the raunchy R&B music heard in today’s clubs, McKnight maintains, and the social media reaction to the sexually explicit lyrical content was a bit overblown, in his eyes.
“I expected that,” he says. “It was a parody to begin with. And what people tend to do is blow things up because everybody’s angry and has something to say. I’ve been writing songs my whole life and I’ve never been the number one trending topic until I wrote [that song]. That’s a very sad commentary. The people who come to my shows know who I am and that I use humour all the time. The people who blew that up were people who haven’t listened to me since 1999.”
Moving forward, McKnight intends to keep making music for as long as he can.
“People still pay their money to come see me,” he notes. “As long as they continue to do that, I would be a fool not to give them what it is that they want. The audience dictates to you where you are and what you should do.
“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 think this will ever go out of style, although you don’t hear a lot of it today.”
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Brian McKnight on CBC Music
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