The Prince of Heartache

Chris Isaak, still bluesy after all these years

Elle Magazine
June, 1995
Edited by Adele Sulcas

Chris Isaak's dreamy, vulnerable gaze has become almost as much his trademark as his music-- blue-suede-cool songs driven by ringing guitar and that melancholy voice, heavy as washed silk. Isaak's photogenic qualities haven't hurt his increasingly successful film career ("Silence of the Lambs," "Little Buddha," "Married to the Mob"), but it's in his music that you'll find his soul-- notably in in "Forever Blue," his fifth album, out this month. It is Isaak says, "about a specific and painful event. The inspiration was a woman, the likes of whom I have never seen before, you know, breathtaking, dangerous, wild, like the sea"--which more or less sums up the dusky atmosphere of unrequited desire that drenched his earlier writing, too. (Just think of his "Wicked Game" video: Isaak and Helena Christensen in one of the sexiest black-and-white, anguished embraces ever filmed.) Isaak describes the feel of the album with this image: "There is a child in the basement--the parents have long since abondoned him. He repeatedly climbs the stairs to a locked door. Is he crying or laughing? It's difficult to be sure..."Wheew. But there is a lighter side to the troubled soul who's become the contemporary incarnation of Bing Crosby, Elvis and Roy Orbison: "I get to surf in the morning, then play music until my neighbors come home," says Isaak. "I am, as Pee-wee Herman used to say, the luckiest boy alive."

Back to Articles