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Tired Of The Boom?
09/21/1999 6:00 PM, Yahoo! Music
Amy Linden
If you want to blow your loverman image to kingdom come, then conducting an interview at a pistol range might be a good place to start. Okay, technically Brian McKnight and I aren't exchanging words: the deafening noise of ricocheting bullets combined with the earplugs we have to wear makes chit-chat damn near impossible. But firing away at a variety of targets is what the heretofore prototypical sensitive soul singer is doing, and with, one might add, absolute glee.
Trying to come off like some thuggish ruggish b-boy is not on the agenda. The 30-year-old singer-songwriter is more than happy to be a big old square, at least when it comes to making music. Offers McKnight, speaking to his somewhat soft image, "You gotta get tired at some point of that boom boom boom and hear something soothing. I thrive on making people think about those things that maybe they don't wanna think about. You don't really want to think about when your heart got ripped from your body when you cared about somebody. But for some reason I've been able to do it and have success with it."
Back At One is more of McKnight's polished yet passionate mature R&B/ pop. The album's songs highlight McKnight the musician as much as McKnight the performer, which is just how he wants it. "I come from that school," McKnight begins. "When people ask me who do I like, it's always the guys who played and wrote and sang their own stuff...I'm from the school that says if I can go in and sort of have the same mindset that the giants in music had, that I'm not gonna do anything in the studio that I can't pull off live. Which also challenges me to say, 'Okay, I'm gonna get better. I'm gonna continue to do things I did before I got a record deal to sustain my career.' It's been 12 years and I'm still here. I love making music, and I wanna be able to do that on my own terms for how ever long I can do it."
McKnight has earned the right to make music his way the hard way by having a big old hit. Always a perennial R&B fave (McKnight was signed when he was all of 19), it was on his third CD, 1997's Anytime, that the Buffalo, N.Y. native found himself moving from the confines of "urban" to the richer pastures of pop. With the top 10 success of Anytime's title track, a song that earned McKnight two Grammy nods, the resoundingly unhip McKnight found himself the object of desire for a bunch of kids who use zit cream. Of course mainstream (that's white) success can often spell trouble for mainstays of black pop, but again, McKnight ain't sweating it.
"I never tried to forsake [my core audience]," he offers. "What I've learned is how to be right in the middle of both--to do enough so that urban feels like they've embraced you and that pop radio doesn't feel like it's threatening."
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