Blue Moon

Chris Isaak takes the pain of lost love and makes an album that can inspire others

San Jose Mercury News
May 12, 1995
By Tom Lanham, Special to the Mercury News

It' another chilly spring night in San Francisco, so Chris Isaak pulls a knob on the dashboard of his restored '64 Chevy Nova to turn on the heat.

Sure enough, warm, dusty air starts pumping in, making the wait more tolerable. Isaak is idling his car in the parking lot at a seafood restaurant, waiting for a space. For 15, 20 minutes he sits there rather than looking elsewhere.

"This is the easiest parking, believe me," he says. "You have to wait for someone to come out. . . . They will. I know they will."

Finally, tail lights flicker up ahead, and Isaak races to the space.

San Franciscans will go to remarkable lengths for good parking, but a psychologist might classify Isaak's behavior asobsessive/compulsive. Which makes sense, since the singer has been more than a little obsessed lately.

A few months ago, his three-year relationship with a woman who was part of his management team ran aground. Now the feelings of despair, failure and loneliness that have dogged him since the breakup have found an outlet in his new concept album, "Forever Blue," being released May 23 by Reprise.

If suffering really does produce great art, Isaak must have cried his eyes out. This disc is the most consistent and invigorating ofhis five albums to date.

In person, Isaak looks pretty much the same as he did on the cover of "Silvertone," his haunting 1985 debut disc, except his '50s-style haircut is a tad shorter.

As he enters the restaurant, he is greeted by the manager. "How's that new album, Chris? When are we gonna get to hear it?"

Isaak jokes about it, laughs and sits down before his bravado fades for a second or two. But soon his crystal-blue eyes are glittering with mischief again, as he sums up the last year in his life: ''You reach the point where people say, 'Are you OK?' And you respond" -- Isaak's gaze turns glassy, and his voice shifts into >monotone -- " 'Uh- huh.' Every answer becomes, 'Yeah . . . sure . . .' "

Several women in the restaurant have recognized the 38-year-old singer, who can be seen not only on his album covers but in films such as Bernardo Bertolucci's "Little Buddha," David Lynch's "Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me" and Jonathan Demme's "Married to the Mob" and "Silence of the Lambs."

Guys this good-looking aren't supposed to have trouble with their love life, are they?

Isaak snickers. "That's what I said. 'Hey,' I said to her as we broke up, 'I'm a handsome rock star! You can't do this to me!' " Switching to a classic "White Heat" Cagney delivery, he continues: " 'You can't do this to me, see? You're not walking out onme, see? I'm walking out on you!'

''That's kind of how it was."

What's missing?

After the breakup, Isaak left the L.A. apartment the couple had shared, heading for San Francisco. "The weirdest thought came to my mind about halfway here," he recalls. "For an instant, I thought, 'What's missing here . . . what's missing? Hey, where's my girlfriend?' Then I realized, oh yeah, that's not gonna be anymore.' I was literally driving and crying . . . "'

The breakup plagued Isaak so persistently that he has penned, not one, but 13 heart-rending songs about it. "Forever Blue," produced by his longtime mentor, Erik Jacobsen, wrings maximum emotion from the minimal, echoey arrangements. It unfolds in two- and three-song chapters, roughly paralleling what someone has called the five stages of grief -- shock, denial, bargaining, hope and acceptance.

To set the particular mood of each track, Isaak used different guitars and guitarists, including Jeff Watson, John Grissom and Mark Goldenberg. And, except for some work on the soundtrack of Clint Eastwood's "A Perfect World," he also put his film career on hold until he worked through "Forever Blue."

''This album, more than ever, is very specific . . . ," says Isaak. "If anything, I had to edit out a lot of stuff. Some things I toned down because they were too dark or too specific to our relationship, which no one would understand but us. I tried to pull back from that and use songs that other people can relate to."

''Baby Did a Bad Bad Thing" opens the set with a sinister snare whisper from drummer Kenney Dale Johnson wrapped in just a hint of R&B guitar. "Did you ever pray with all your heart and soul just to watch her walk away?" Isaak moans. Then he moves into the guttural chorus: "Baby did a bad bad thing/ And I feel like cryin'."

The next track, "Somebody's Crying," offers some gentle folk-style strumming, a Gene Pitney melody and a soft, agreeable vocal in the third person: "I know somebody and they called your name/ A million times and still you never came." What exactly was the "bad, bad thing" that tore this romance apart?

''The incident that happened . . . the main thing . . . I couldn't talk about, because it would still be painful for her," Isaak stammers. "I could say that it came like an explosion; it came when I was totally unaware. And it was like, one day you have a relationship and you think everything's pretty good, and the next, nothing. So I think the 'bad, bad thing' . . . is when you find out they don't love you when you thought they did.

''I was very confused about this thing; so at a certain point I started making a list. I just wrote things down, and in a weird way it was like doing math. I looked at it thinking, 'What went wrong and where?' And I saw that, no matter how I added up the column, it came out that she didn't love me."

Isaak resorts to humor whenever the conversation about "Forever Blue" gets too heavy. "I still keep imagining that maybe she'll come back and say, 'Why, honey, you misunderstood. When I placed that snake on your pillow, it was a love charm!' "

The third track, "Graduation Day," finds him lost in a high-school reverie, singing in a quieter, more hushed style than on his previous albums. Then he steps up the pace for the fervent rocker "Go Walking Down There," howling about old romantic haunts while guitar licks streak through the air like lightning. Says Isaak, "I like that saying 'You can never go home again.' Thereare lines in 'Graduation Day' that are very emotional to me, like: 'A million dreams have all gone bad.'

''There are so many things in my life that I've tried to make work and then screwed up. I don't know. God must watch over me, 'cause he's followed me around and just given me one good thing after another. Like, 'Here, I'm gonna put you in California on the coast; I'm gonna give you a healthy body and a good mind.' ''My karma could've been born in some poverty slum somewhere in the world, with no chance. Instead, I'm born with a lot of things in my favor. And still I'm able to screw things up pretty good."

''Don't Leave Me on My Own" is a swaying foot-tapper. It's followed by "Things Go Wrong," a bluesy ballad tinged with optimism: "Trying to remember what it was I said you'd done. . . . Things go wrong, but I still love you."

Letters never sent

The title cut, however, dips so deeply into the Roy Orbison/Chet Baker well of tears that it sends chills down your spine.

" 'Forever Blue' is my favorite," Isaak says. "It has a line in it that I heard my brother say once: 'I did my best; life did the rest.'

''I sat down to write a love letter to my ex, and I wrote her a lot of love letters. But I never sent 'em. After gigs in Europe, Hong Kong, I'd go back to my room, and I'd write her a letter, because I'd be alone and I'd be thinking about her. And one night, I started off, 'Nobody ever tells you exactly what to do. . . . She walks away, you're left to stay, alone -- forever blue.'

''And I thought the next line's gotta open up and be about something bigger than distance, bigger than just yourself. And I got,'The stars have all stopped shining.' And that was good, because, as you're looking out at the world, it's not just you when things go really bad."

The next tracks are a bit more hopeful. "There She Goes" has chiming rockabilly guitars and lines such as: "I see her everywhere, everywhere I go." And on "Goin' Nowhere," Isaak loses himself in a frothy surf reverb and a bevy of bimbos.

The singer says he's really happy with the reflective "Changed Your Mind," which again presents "a pretty dismal view of things: 'I want your love, I need your love. Too late -- you changed your mind.'

''That's what some people say nowadays," he adds. "They start by saying, 'I love you forever.' But whenever it becomes convenient, they begin to make excuses: 'Uh, forever? Well, I didn't realize that you were gonna be so messy! I changed my mind!'

''I think it's best if you listen to that song on 'repeat.' I made it fade out so it could fade right back in on the beginning. If you hit 'repeat' on your CD player, it makes a kind of loop. That's me on guitar, and Kenney's playing really quiet, a little rolling drum part.

With the album's last three tracks, Isaak reaches some level of acceptance. "Shadows in a Mirror" is sparse and cold, with the singer staring long and hard at his reflection and murmuring, "Shadows in a mirror tell me that we're through."

''I Believe" is a sunnier, hand-clapping cut in which Isaak sounds almost Gospel-devout belting the verse: "I believe in lovers walking side by side. . . . I believe that someday we'll be satisfied." But then the guitars and drums stop, and Isaak sings the unaccompanied coda: "But not for me and not for you . . . sometimes all our dreams just don't come true."

''The End of Everything" has the line: "Take your love with you when you go." And as the final note of pedal steel fades out, the twittering of birds can be heard just for a moment.

Why toss in bird songs at the end of the disc?

Isaak says he "listened to the whole (master tape), all the way through, sitting out on my back porch. And at the close of 'End of Everything,' I thought, 'Man, what a dark song." But there was this big tree out there, and I hear chirp, chirp, chirp, and it made me laugh.

''I'm thinking, 'Oh yeah, your record's really important!' But when I heard those birds I thought, 'I don't want people to have an idea that life is a bad thing.' I would really feel horrible if someone would listen to my music and get off into a dark space."

Dark thoughts and others

He adds, however, that not all dark sentiments are counter- productive. "I used to listen to Roy Orbison records when I was alone, growing up in Stockton. And, as dark as they got, I always thought, 'Hey, there's another guy like me out there! I may be in a dark place, but there are other people here, too; so it's OK."

Isaak is best known for his innocuous hit single "Wicked Game" from the 1989 album, "Heart-Shaped World." It went top-10 a full year after the album's release, finally giving Isaak platinum status. The 1993 follow-up, "San Francisco Days," didn't spin off any hits but went gold.

After these successes, doesn't Isaak worry that the confessional nature of the new album may not go down well with his fans?

''I think it's good to tell people about stuff," he says. "It's kind of a sarcastic view of the world. But go ahead, tell your deepest, darkest secret to everyone. Go ahead because, No. 1, you'll be surprised how good it feels to get it off your chest. And, No. 2,after you get done telling them everything that's in your head . . . they'll probably turn to you and say, 'Hey, did you see "TheFlintstones" on TV last night?'

''A lot of it is going to be missed; so you might as well tell the truth -- make it as real as you can, and hope that some portion of it gets through."

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