Brianna Knight: Everything or Nothing

Hailing from Spring Valley, New York, is neo-soul artist Brianna Knight. Like many artists, she first got her bearings in the church, becoming deeply involved by way of her gospel oriented mother. On the flip side, her Jamaican father was rooted in neo-soul. “It's funny because my father came [over] and he fully assimilated. He took over a neo-soul background, so when I think of who introduced me to like Jill Scott, Erykah Badu, and Maxwell, it was really my father.”

Despite growing up in and around music, she originally didn’t see herself as a musician but rather dreamed of being a teacher. “I wanted to help people. [I] still do just in different ways.”

Throughout high school and college, she began receiving opportunities in music that stuck with her and ultimately helped her decide to work towards a music career. “I had these old ladies throw me like $400 to sing one cover song. I'd be like ‘okay whatever’ mind you, you're not thinking of how that's really important [that] somebody sees your value before you can even see it.”

Since then, the opportunities have gotten even bigger, from singing at the Apollo to demo writing for artists such as Kehlani and Summer Walker. 

However, writing didn’t always come easily to her. In fact, she never intended to be a writer. It wasn't until she joined a poetry club in college that she saw the full value in writing . “. I joined Urban Lyrics and was like, ‘whatever’. I just need something to keep me occupied while I'm trying to join these other singing clubs. They let me in, and they said, 'We know you're a singer, but we're poets here first. So you need to write all the time.” 

And write she does. Knight writes every day, constantly working the muscle and pulling from the life experiences around her, whether it be a juicy conversation or heartbreak. These experiences allow her to bring authenticity and vulnerability to her music.

From there, she began listening to spoken word from Button Poetry and analyzing works from Nikki Giovanni and Sonia Sanchez. Through poetry, she began to learn more about herself as an artist and what her art represents: “What it means to be Black, what it means to be a woman, what it means to navigate as a creative, and then how you encompass all of those things in your art, even when you're not directly saying it.”

After poetry, choosing to go the neo-soul route was an easy decision. “I felt the most free. I feel like with neo-soul, it didn't really matter how I looked. I'm not the biggest person by far, but it always felt like I stuck out like a sore thumb. Even when singing.”

Aside from the physical aspects, to Knight, neo-soul also represents the freedom missing from contemporary R&B. “There's not a lot of, at least to me, there's not a lot of freedom to figure out what you can bend or how much you can make people think. The contemporary R&B we currently have is very on the nose. Neo soul leans more into that jazz and that funk, it could do things, at least for me, that I could say is like a tingle in my brain.”

One of her most recent singles, 'Everything or Nothing,' has a more interesting story. It derived from her binge-watching 90s romantic comedies and analyzing how love was being presented to us on screen. The dramatic, moody song is meant to sound as if "SWV, Brandy, and then like Summer Walker had a baby."

Knight wanted to get back to the feeling of 90s R&B where artist where sliding down the side of the building in the rain but bring in an element of choosing yourself when things aren't going to work. "My favorite thing about the song is in the second verse. I still say that I love that person. It's just I love me more than what you're doing to me. So I gotta step away and we don't hear that enough."

Next, she put out 'Bigger Person' a song about putting your pride aside to make a relationship work. Both songs are the first of many dropping in the coming year marking a new era for Knight. “This will be the first time in the fall when having this full project ready to go. It's called Movies in My Mind. I want to do this cute tradition, like let's bring back summer mixtapes!”

If these two songs are any indicator of what this upcoming project will hold, we the people are in for a treat.