R&B singer-songwriter Brian McKnight has steadily been touring and releasing records for almost 20 years at this point, but you might be forgiven for not knowing that. He crossed over from the R&B/soul charts into mainstream pop culture in the late ’90s with the prom-night slow jams “Anytime” and “Back at One,” but has since slid back into the quasi-invisible world of tidy ballads and Christmas carols with your grandma’s boyfriend Josh Groban. Barring child-support dramas and allegations of not paying the staff for his short-lived syndicated talk show, McKnight has maintained a relatively scandal-free public existence, a rare feat for a man with, like I said, almost 20 years under his belt.
— Ashley Spurgeon