“Wicked Game” by Chris Isaak

Chris Isaak wrote "Wicked Game" alone and put it on Heart Shaped World, his third album, in 1989, and the single promptly sank without a ripple. It took a movie to save it. After David Lynch used it in Wild at Heart in 1990, Lee Chesnut, a music director at an Atlanta station with a soft spot for Lynch's films, started playing it, and the slow burn caught. By March 1991 it was a top-ten hit, peaking at No. 6 on the Billboard Hot 100, and it went to No. 1 in Belgium.

It's the loneliest-sounding hit of its day. Erik Jacobsen produced, and the record is mostly space: James Calvin Wilsey's guitar shivering with reverb, Rowland Salley's bass and Kenney Dale Johnson's drums barely there, and Isaak's croon rising into a wounded falsetto, with Cynthia Lloyd and Christine Wall's backing vocals drifting in like fog. It's a love song that sounds like a warning.

Herb Ritts shot the video in Hawaii with Helena Christensen, and it won two MTV Video Music Awards in 1991. The song has since been covered by all kinds of musicians, and it turns up in the 2010 book 1001 Songs You Must Hear Before You Die.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.