Credit: Far Out / Alan Light / Lars Richter
October 20th, 2026 · 10:30pm BST
In the 1990s, Chris Isaak’s biggest hit, ‘Wicked Game’, was playing almost everywhere. So much so that you could easily have passed it off as another industry tale of instant success, a song so destined for greatness it practically wrote itself. But really, it was anything but.
It serves as a metaphor for Isaak’s career, one that has rather bizarrely straddled success and obscurity.
Until its release, Isaak was enduring a somewhat middling career, where his songs would be released to a small number of dedicated fans while the rest of the world failed to connect with them on any deeper level. So sure, he was enjoying the life of a full-time musician, but not at the level he had hoped for.
The now-iconic track from his 1989 album Heart Shaped World was supposed to be the track that changed that trajectory. To Isaak, it fitted the entire profile of something that was destined to be a hit, not just sonically with its infectious vocal hook, but because of how simply it came to him, in a matter of minutes. If there’s one thing musicians passionately believe, it’s that hits present themselves effortlessly.
But its initial release brought none of that expected success. Sure, it went down well with Isaak’s fans, but the mould was yet to be broken. Then Isaak received a phone call, letting him know that the surrealist director David Lynch was going to use an acoustic version of the track in his upcoming film, Wild at Heart.
Flattering, of course, but hardly a route to commercial success: Lynch and commercialism have never gone hand in hand. “I enjoy talking about David Lynch because he’s such a great guy,” Isaak said.
“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,” said Isaak.
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Adding, “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’.”
Even if it never became a global hit, Isaak was happy for the song to have a place in the world of such a groundbreaking director. But then, upon the release of the film, something changed. Suddenly, ‘Wicked Game’ was tapping into the zeitgeist in a way that only Lynch could genuinely achieve, and everyone was playing it everywhere. At first, it was inseparable from Lynch’s dreamlike world, but by the end of the decade, the song had made an identity for itself.
It eventually rose to the sixth spot on the US Billboard Hot 100 before continuing to achieve cult status among music and film fans, both old and new. Today, it’s been streamed over a billion times, and it’s hard to believe it ever failed to land.
