Wicked Game is without question Chris Isaak’s best known song. The brooding, lovelorn song is performed with an inner intensity which belies its quiet treatment, filled with strong emotions dressed in a melancholic, almost mournful, musical accompaniment.
It begins with the desolate wail of James Calvin Wilsey’s vintage 1965 Stratocaster, set to Kenney Dale Johnson’s quiet, brushed drum loop, Rowland Sally’s simple (yet very full, hypnotic, and soothing) bass line, and wonderfully understated background vocals. They all contribute to a simmering atmospheric buzz, which becomes complete as Chris Isaak’s aching vocal adds a heart-wrenching tale of obsessive love on top. It melts together effortlessly, preserving that moment in time when time stands still from pure anticipation and longing.
Wicked Game is also the type of song that just grows in power as the shadows grow long. When people eventually start settling in after the hustle and bustle of the day is over, they try to take solace in the night’s more pensive moods, but can often discover that this is the point when moods and thoughts that you brushed aside during the day tend to come out in force, taking up the headspace that they were denied earlier. And they won’t let go.
The song is a dark mood piece. It is otherworldly and dreamy, yet with real emotions that are equipped to hit really hard – especially if those same feelings are carried inside the listener. Just about all of us have at some point had thoughts similar to the ones found in this song. Those type of thoughts that are prone to creeping out when we least expect it, refusing to leave us in peace.
The world was on fire and no-one could save me but you
It’s strange what desire will make foolish people do
I’d never dreamed that I’d meet somebody like you
And I’d never dreamed that I’d lose somebody like youNo, I don’t wanna fall in love
(This world is only gonna break your heart)
No, I don’t wanna fall in love
(This world is only gonna break your heart)
With you
The song was released as a single from Isaak’s third album Heart Shaped World on 14 July 1989, the album having appeared on 13 June. In spite of the song’s obvious qualities, it did not appear on the Billboard Hot 100 or any other major singles charts. This was disappointing to Isaak, who was sure this song had what it took to get him noticed on a wider level.
One person who noticed the song during its initial run and saw its potential was movie director David Lynch. The song very much spoke to his penchant for atmospheric, brooding music, and he desperately wanted to use that music in his next film. Isaak was happy to oblige, hoping that this would give the song another chance to get noticed. The song ended up appearing both in original and extended instrumental form in the 1990 film Wild At Heart, starring Nicolas Cage and Laura Dern. The match between song and movie was perfect. The song was included on the soundtrack, and also re-released as a single.
Lee Chesnut, an Atlanta radio station music director who was obsessed with David Lynch films, fell in love with the song after watching Wild At Heart. He wasted no time putting the song in rotation, giving the vocal version of the song some extensive visibility. It became the station’s most requested song, and slowly but surely the rest of the country started taking notice as well.
18 months after its initial release, the track had become a Top 10 hit in the US, reaching #6 on the Billboard Hot 100 in February 1991. It also reached #10 in the UK charts and was a Top 10 hit in several other countries, going all the way to #1 in Belgium.
The song was not an immediate hit, and by all accounts, it was not an immediate track to finish either. Mark Needham, who worked with Isaak on Wicked Game as an engineer, has claimed that it took several years to put the track together.
In an interview with mixonline.com in 2002, Needham said “Wicked Game had been kicking around for several years before the definitive version was put together. Many incarnations had made it to tape, but none felt quite right. That song had a long life, a real long life. Chris had played it with the band many times, and we’d recorded a bunch of different versions, with different arrangements. But we never thought that the drum track had the metronomic feel that we really wanted. That was something it really needed, especially in the verses, to convey the song.”
Isaak recorded the track again in 1988, when the band converged upon Fantasy Studios in Berkeley, California to create the Heart Shaped World album. Once again, many different versions and arrangements of the song were made before they arrived at the final version.
In spite of the song’s organic, present, and natural sound, in the end the song was created using methods seemingly opposed to how the song comes across. It was largely a studio creation, achieved with samples, loops, and a relentless, perfectionist vision.
When James Calvin Wilsey created and played the distinctive guitar lead using a Fender Stratocaster’s vibrato arm, both the bassline and drums were sampled from previous recordings of the song and looped. Johnson’s drum tracks, for example, were sampled into an Akai DD1000 sampler (Needham referred to it as an “ancient forerunner to Pro Tools”); then they began making loops and reinventing the groove.
“I’d been doing stuff with the early Eventide H3000s and other boxes,” Needham recalled to Mixonline.com. “Sampling was still in a primitive state, but we were making loops using samples and triggering them off MIDI. For Wicked Game, the samples came from various 24-track outtake versions that we were never really happy with. We’d take six or seven different brush patterns and make loop patterns we could trigger off a MIDI note.”
Guitars are key to the song. Isaak himself played two acoustics: one standard and one in a Nashville-style high-strung tuning he’d picked up from Night Ranger’s Jeff Watson. The haunting lead was by Silvertone’s guitarist at the time, James Calvin Wilsey. That, too, was painstakingly crafted. Although Wilsey’s melody had been written and played with the live tracks, the version that appears on the record was put together from numerous tracks overdubbed over a period of a couple of weeks, then comped and refined piece by piece.
The song is in B Dorian, which is often described as a “brooding, sorrowfully conflicted” tone, which played to Isaak’s strengths as a vocalist. He got that really big vocal sound singing in the tiny control room using speakers instead of headphones. “He was singing to the speakers, really soft,” Needham explained. “If you listen really carefully, there’s a change in the cymbal sound every time the vocal comes in, because you’re hearing the bleed of the cymbals through the monitors into the vocal mic.”
Although the song is often interpreted as a ballad about unrequited love, Isaak has said that the song was inspired by a telephone call from a woman seeking to arrange a hook-up and is about “what happens when you have a strong attraction to people that aren’t necessarily good for you.” It was written shortly after the call.
In other words, Wicked Game is a tale of obsessive love. Chris Isaak spoke to Songfacts in 2011 about the late-night event which inspired the song: “This one I wrote really late at night and it was written in a short time, because I remember that a girl had called me and said, ‘I want to come over and talk to you,’ and ‘talk’ was a euphemism. And she said, ‘I want to come over and talk to you until you’re no longer able to stand up.’ And I said, ‘Okay, you’re coming over.’ And as soon as I hung up I thought, ‘Oh, my God. I know she’s gonna be trouble. She’s always been trouble. She’s a wildcat. And here I am, I’m going to get killed, but I’m doing this.’ And I wrote Wicked Game: ‘The world is on fire and no one can save me but you.’ It’s like you start thinking about it, and by the time she came over to the house, I had the song written. And I think she was probably upset because I was more excited by the song. (Laughing) I was like, ‘Yes, you’re gorgeous, baby. But listen to this song!'”
Isaak also said Wicked Game came to him effortlessly: “I think that sometimes you get easy ones that come very quick and you’re really glad – you go, ‘Wow, where’d this come from?’ It’s so fast to write. And then there’s other songs that you do and it’s like doing your homework. It’s like you really are working and biting the pencil and working on that third verse. Most of the time you do work. But sometimes you get lucky.”
No music video had been comissioned for the song in 1989, but with Wild At Heart giving it a new lease of life, a video was comissioned and put out in 1991. This would become a gigantic MTV and VI1 hit, as well as one of the defining videos of its era.
It was directed by fashion photographer Herb Ritts, shot in black and white (which Ritts often did), and features Isaak and supermodel Helena Christensen in a sensual encounter on the beach. The video is quite sexy, with the two of them caressing each other and whispering in each other’s ears. Christensen is topless through most of the video, although her nudity is concealed by camera angles.
What a wicked thing to say, you never felt this way
What a wicked thing to do, to make me dream of you
And I don’t wanna fall in love
(This world is only gonna break your heart)
No, I don’t wanna fall in love
(This world is only gonna break your heart)
With youNobody loves no one
This video was shot in Hawaii at what was formerly known as Kamoamoa Beach in Hawaii Volcanoes National Park on the Big Island. The newly formed black-sand beach was created from lava from Kilauea volcano flowing into the ocean about a mile away. The beach was covered by lava not long after the video was shot.
“Yeah, it looks romantic in the video,” Chris Isaak said in a 2015 interview published by the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, “but in real life we’re on a beach, and they’re throwing buckets of cold seawater on us to keep us wet, and there was wind. If you look at her body, you can see her goosebumps. She was freezing, she was shivering. She was holding on to me, and I said “you poor thing, hold on to me, it will be warmer at least!” He also added, “Helena was a really, really good actress! I mean, it looked like she really liked me!”
Isaak’s last comment may sound like a joke, but he genuinely did have concerns about himself cast as a sexy counterpart to the supermodel. He said, “We shot the whole video and afterwards I remember they showed me the rushes. They wanted my comments on the editing and everything, and I had the stupidest comment. People laughed at it. I said, I love it, but I don’t think they’re gonna play it. I don’t think it’s going to be sexy enough for them to play it. I know people have said it’s a sexy video later on, but you’ve got to remember: I’m in it! And so every time I was in it and they were showing me, I was thinking ‘That’s just boring and bad.’ I said, ‘Can’t you cut more of the girl in it and get rid of me more?’ He just laughed, ‘You have to be there to sing the song!’ ‘Couldn’t I be like a ghost in the background singing it?’ ‘No!’ But luckily I listened to Herb Ritz instead of my own fears, and it came out good.”
This video ended up winning an MTV Video Music Award for Best Male Video and Best Cinematography. It is still fondly remembered by many, regularly featuring on “Sexiest Music Videos Ever”-type lists. It was ranked #13 on VH1’s 100 Greatest Videos, #4 on VH1’s 50 Sexiest Video Moments, #73 on Rolling Stone magazine’s The 100 Top Music Videos, a notable #1 on Rolling Stone Magazine’s The 30 Sexiest Music Videos of All Time, and a #1 on Fuse’s 40 Sexiest Videos in 2010.
There was also a second music video of the song – or rather, a lesser known first one. A music video was first commissioned in 1990 as a tie-in to the Wild At Heart movie. This video was directed by David Lynch, and features scenes of Lula (Laura Dern) and Sailor (Nicolas Cage) from the film interspersed with black-and-white footage of Isaak and his band performing the song. It did well, but tied the song too strongly to a movie which had a limited lifespan. With the song eclipsing the movie in popularity, a more independent video was required, The Lynch-directed video did however also win an MTV Video Music Award in 1991, in the category Best Video from a Film.
Isaak became a solid friend of David Lynch during their collaboration on the song. In turn, Lynch saw something in Isaak that inspired him enough to want to cast him in his future projects. He ended up playing the part of FBI special agent Chester Desmond in the 1992 film Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me.
Isaak later spoke to interviewer Mike Ragogna about David Lynch: “I enjoy talking about David Lynch because he’s such a great guy. The question I get about him is, ‘How is David Lynch? Is he scary or spooky or something?’ I don’t think it’s ever guys who make films like David makes or who have that kind of weird bent in their artwork–those guys are probably the nicest guys in real life because they’ve expressed all of their weird angles. The guys you have to watch are the guys who go, ‘I’m a scout master, the proud father of two children, and I’m also a deacon in the church.’ Then you go, ‘Be careful.’ If he’s out in the back yard at night with a shovel, be careful because he’s burying something.”
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