Five Questions With Chris Isaak

Associated Press
November 18, 1998

NEW YORK (AP) -- The scene: his brother's loft in Los Angeles, 4 a.m., windows open on a hot night to catch the hint of a breeze. Sleep is fitful, so Chris Isaak lies in bed listening to a Mexican station on the radio. Suddenly he hears a voice that stuns him, heartbreaking enough to impress even this master of melancholy. He has to have that record. He doesn't know the name of the song. He doesn't know the name of the singer. He doesn't even know the call letters of the radio station. That doesn't dissuade him. Isaak picks up the phone and begins calling radio stations. At the third one, he pleads with a disc jockey to tell him everything the station played during the past half hour. He'll buy all the records, just to find that voice again. When the bewildered disc jockey balks, Isaak tries another approach, singing the only English line of the song that he remembers. The disc jockey answers immediately: "Maya Rodriguez."

That's the easy part. Isaak spends the next day searching through more than a dozen record stores before finally finding a Maya Rodriguez record.

"I bring her music when I'm making a movie," he said. "Whenever I'm in a dark mood and I want to cry, she just does it every time."

It's the kind of obsession known only to those who love, and live for, music. This Californian has always been that way. Seven years after the brooding "Wicked Game" put Isaak on the map as a Roy Orbison for the 1990s, he's still making albums with the kick of rock 'n' roll and enough sadness to make Maya Rodriguez proud.

A day before he flies to Australia, Isaak, 42, pauses in a New York record company office to talk about his seventh album, "Speak of the Devil."

1. Are you speaking of any devil in particular?

Isaak: Women. The chested devil -- the woman. The type of woman who, when she walks by, you'd be talking to your friend about your pancreatic cancer surgery and suddenly you see his eyes glaze over and as you're talking, his head swivels past. The show completely stops for a beautiful woman.

2. You've never hesitated to draw from your life experiences when writing songs. Have you ever regretted it?

Isaak: No. When I've put things from my life in my songs I've tried not to put things in that somebody else would find unappealing about their life. I don't write about my ex-girlfriends. I wouldn't put something mean-spirited about them in a song. ... On this record, I have names on there of people I've gone out with. I don't think they were mentioned in any way offensive: 'Tyree, what a team we could have made.' It was somebody I went out with long ago and she probably never thinks of me at all. But it's a way of me saying, 'I haven't forgotten you.' If I've got mean-spirited things to say, I just say it on the tour bus.

3. You don't like to talk too much about your music. Why?

Isaak: It's not my favorite thing to do. Usually, I make jokes about things when people ask me about music. Because when you really think about how you write songs, there's no easy way to tell people. It's either so simple or so complex that it's ineffable. You can't say it. The other problem is -- besides not being able to describe that process very well -- is that when you do try to describe it, you sound like a (jerk).

4. You wrote a song with ("My Heart Will Go On" author) Dianne Warren. How did that happen and how did it work out?

Isaak: I was just trying to do different things. If you're a painter and you've always painted with a brush and you want to do something new, grab a can of spray paint. I don't do a lot of writing with other people, and I wanted to try doing it. But I didn't want to do it with someone who writes like I do. If they write minor key, introspective music, if it's at all in the same realm of what I do, what do I need that for? I thought if we could get one of those big, soaring choruses with my minor key verses, it would be a good combination, which is kind of what we ended up getting.

5. Do you listen to a lot of other music?

Isaak: Yes, I do. I've listened to Beck a lot in the last year or two. He's fun because he's combined country and blues to rap and elements of hip-hop. You're just going, what is this? He's throwing a lot of stuff together and that's really fantastic. They had a guy who used to do it like that -- Elvis. He put together country and blues and made something new. I like the Verve, they had a very good album. I bought it for the single and I stayed for the whole movie. I looked at (singer Richard Ashcroft's) picture, if we were at a party, me and him would probably be rassling in the bean dip. He looks like he'd be a troublemaker. But looks are deceiving.

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