Chris Isaak’s Heart Shaped World Is a Mood Masterpiece: Double-Platinum Album Features the Smash “Wicked Game,” Brilliant Singing, and Extraordinary Guitar Tones

Experience the Brooding 1989 Album in Audiophile Sound: Mobile Fidelity’s Numbered-Edition Hybrid SACD Plays with Superb Clarity, Detail, and Tonality

There was nothing in contemporary music like Chris Isaak’s Heart Shaped World when it hit shelves in June 1989. More than three decades later, the singer-songwriter’s third album still sounds unique — and claims a backstory nearly as fascinating as the retro-leaning material and standout performances that propelled it to sales of more than 2.5 million copies. Home to the Top 10 smash “Wicked Game,” the set remains a masterful mood piece that invites you to pour a late-night drink, sit in a dimmed room, and relish Isaak’s elegant albeit raw ruminations on love, relationships, and questionable decisions. 

Sourced from the original master tapes and housed in mini-LP-style gatefold packaging, Mobile Fidelity's numbered-edition hybrid SACD presents Heart Shaped World in audiophile quality. It unearths the staggering inner details, saturated tones, and brilliant atmospherics of the crisp production. And it brings you up close and personal with Isaak’s spectacular singing — impeccably controlled, tense, brooding, steamy, smoldering, haunted — situated amidst stripped-down backdrops that allow notes to fully bloom and decay. 

While Isaak’s ever-steady baritone remains the anchor, the contributions of his trusty backing band, the aptly named Silvertone, come across with just as much cool, command, and realism. The indispensable playing of guitarist James Calvin Wilsey particularly emerges with superb clarity and dimensionality. The character of his 1965 Fender Stratocaster, shivering twang of his spring-coiled fills, and his signature use of reverb, delay, and vibrato seamlessly match Isaak's patient deliveries and the band’s unhurried rhythms. The record’s lonesome temperaments and pensive themes have never been more alluring on disc. 

Of course, if not for director David Lynch hand-picking two cuts from Heart Shaped World for his 1990 film Wild at Heart, the record would’ve probably suffered the same fate as Isaak’s prior efforts and gone unnoticed by the mainstream. Despite receiving raves from outlets such as NME, Chicago Tribune, and Rolling Stone upon its original release, the album stalled in the lower quadrants of the Billboard charts and, after a few weeks, dropped off. 

Cue the ear of Lee Chesnut. Then the music director for a large Atlanta radio station, Chesnut heard the instrumental version of “Wicked Game” on Lynch’s soundtrack and started airing the album rendition all hours of the day. Aided by a sensual video featuring Isaak and supermodel Helena Christensen, the song found its way into the public consciousness by early ‘91 and helped make Isaak a most unlikely mainstream star in an era where his techniques had little to nothing in common with popular tastes. 

Despite its vintage vibes and shared DNA with legends such as Roy Orbison, Chet Baker, and Glen Campbell, Heart Shaped World transcends nostalgia, rockabilly, and throwback tropes. For all the melodrama and sadness at hand, Isaak’s gorgeously transparent singing dives deep underneath emotional surfaces. He mines subtleties that indicate his feelings go beyond heartbreak and anguish, and occasionally suggest frustration, menace, and anger. You can hear it in his quivering falsetto, and the slow and methodical ways he allows delicate whispers to break into shadowy phrasing that crosses over to the darker sides of romance and desire.

That approach bolsters the title track, which suggests calm yet moves on ominous currents — its simmering pace and snare-drum snappiness foreshadowing Isaak raising the volume and urgency during the coda. The southwestern-tinged “Wrong to Love You” plays with similar concepts of hesitation, unease, and discord, Isaak careful never to fully erupt and give anything away. His poised deliveries offer a master class in the art of insinuation and hurt on “Nothing’s Changed,” sent up with a wordless backing chorus and crackling guitar lines straight out of a Memphis blues joint. 

Heart Shaped World further boosts its merit via its abundant stylistic variations, from the upbeat country-and-western trot of “I’m Not Waiting” and Spanish acoustic shimmer of the jazz-based ballad “Blue Spanish Sky” to the swinging horn-accompanied grooves of “Don’t Make Me Love You” and desert smokiness of the understated “Kings of the Highway.” On the latter, Isaak comes across as resigned and absolute. His singing and pain worm their way into your soul, and echo akin to the way the music prepares to strike when you least expect. 

“Trouble going 'round,” Isaak croons right as the album begins. “Trouble going down.” Damn straight. 

A quick note on “In the Heat of the Jungle”: On original CD releases of Heart Shaped World, this track clocks in at 6:20. For this reissue, Mobile Fidelity Sound Lab used the shorter 4:38 version originally included on original vinyl copies of Heart Shaped World. The label supplied MoFi with the shorter version.