“Wicked Game”
Chris Isaak
Heart Shaped World
1989, Reprise
This Exit: “The world was on fire/And no one could save me but you,” warbles Chris Isaak—his youthful desperation accented by a retro-falsetto, slicked-back pompadour, glistening pink and black suit, and white Gibson custom ES-345 with Bigsby vibrato and Varitone in place, presenting the singer as a ghost emerging from an era long since past. Put the gimmick of his fixation with rockabilly 50’s fashion aside—especially given the fact that the 80’s era that delivered Chris Isaak is almost as long since past as the 50’s were to him back then (and the sandy, topless, twenty-one-year-old supermodel with whom he romped around on the beach in the song’s famous video is now over forty)—and absorb the ghostliness of his music and timelessness of his lyrics on their own accord. ”Wicked Game” is Chris Isaak’s “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry,” it’s “world was on fire…” his “Hear that lonesome whippoorwill/He sounds too blue to fly;” a simple but apocalyptic vision and a lyric as straightforward as it is nearly impossible to write. Try it. In it is contained an example as good as any of a masterful country song’s ability to portray grandiose, complex emotions with small, economical strokes, stirring tidal waves with wistful sighs. All this says nothing for James Wilsey’s haunting and iconic lead guitar line, a further demonstration of the elusive paradox that is classic country.
