I listened to 92 covers of "Wicked Game"

Well, almost. Maybe half. Probably less than that.

I’m no expert, but these might be the two most attractive people who ever lived.

July 14th marks 35 years since the release of Chris Isaak’s iconic unrequited love song “Wicked Game.” Now, you might be doing some basic math in your head and thinking “Wait a minute, Gena, that would make it released in 1989. Isn’t this a 90s song, if not the 90s song?” Well, yes, on both counts.

The initial 1989 release of “Wicked Game,” the only single from Isaak’s third album Heart-Shaped World, flopped miserably. Though Isaak was a talented singer, songwriter, and guitar player, a hit with critics, and, oh yes, devastatingly handsome, his flavor of retro rockabilly with a skosh of country music just stubbornly refused to find a mainstream audience.

Here’s where I come into the picture, at one of the only times in my entire life where I was actually ahead of the curve on something, and liked it before it was hip.

I worked at a record store during the holiday season of 1990 and into the new year. Not a hip indie record store, mind you, a mall record store, but it remains, to date, the coolest job I’ve ever had. Because it was the holiday season, we were required to play Christmas music in the store at all times (A Very Special Christmas was new during that period, and unsurprisingly also the only album that didn’t make me want to kill myself after hearing it six times a day five days a week).

Whenever the manager was off, occasionally some braver souls than I would give the holiday tunes a rest for a bit by swapping them out for something else. Because the Christmas music began to feel like how the military forced Manuel Noriega to surrender by blasting heavy metal outside his compound at all hours of the night, I tried to block a lot of it out, and so didn’t pay much attention to what was playing when it wasn’t Christmas music either.

And then, one relatively quiet evening, while I was restocking something (probably the massive Led Zeppelin box set, that was a big seller that season), I heard it: that mournful, twanging guitar. And then the smooth, seductive, but also somehow heartbroken pipes of one Chris Isaak, singing “The world was on fire, and no one could save me but you…”

I approached the checkout counter, where the store CD player was located, my hands almost outstretched in a beckoning pose like Oliver Twist, and asked my co-worker standing there “Please…what is this?”

Let me clarify, I hadn’t even heard the entire song. But barely a minute into it, I needed to know more, and my answer was that it was from the soundtrack to David Lynch’s Wild at Heart. Without even bothering to check what else was on it¹ (nor had I seen the movie yet, and wouldn’t until a few years later), I immediately bought the soundtrack and became hopelessly obsessed with “Wicked Game.”

I want to take a moment and try to illustrate the dire state of pop music circa 1990 to 1991. With some glaring exceptions (“Nothing Compares 2 U,” “Personal Jesus”), it was an aggressively bland, mayonnaise sandwich set to music period. My guess is that it was pushback against the rise of hip-hop music, much like Barry Manilow and Neil Diamond dominating the pop charts in 1980 was pushback against the popularity of disco. Regardless, though we were less than a year away from the release of Nevermind, the top acts were Wilson Phillips, Vanilla Ice, and Milli Vanilli. There has never been any accounting for taste in pop music, and there never will be, so let’s stop kidding ourselves.

ANYWAY, suffice to say, I had never heard anything like “Wicked Game” before. It was moody, it was sexy, it was dark, it was beautiful. I had only been in two relationships by that point (both of which were disastrous wastes of time), and had no personal experience with what “unrequited love” felt like, but I sure had some unrequited crushes, and this song captured all the loneliness and heartbreak of that. I began pushing it on other people like audio crack cocaine, adding it to mix tapes, playing it for anyone who had a cassette player in their car, and talking it up like I was Chris Isaak’s personal PR rep.

Now, while I can’t take credit for America’s discovery of “Wicked Game,” it is amusingly coincidental that within weeks of buying the soundtrack to Wild at Heart, a video for “Wicked Game” started playing on MTV, usually during the late evening alternative sets. Not the video, but a video, interspersing clips of the movie with Isaak, who, again, was incredibly fucking handsome, performing with his band. As it turned out, an Atlanta radio DJ named Lee Chesnut was a big fan of David Lynch, and like me, was taken with “Wicked Game.” He began playing it on his station, where it became enough of a sleeper hit that it warranted a video.

And then, a few months later, Herb Ritts happened.

When the music industry finally acknowledged how unbelievably good-looking Chris Isaak was, Ritts, known mostly as a fashion photographer, was commissioned to direct a second video for “Wicked Game” that featured Isaak and supermodel Helena Christensen. Set on a Hawaiian island and shot in crisp black and white, I don’t know if there’s ever been a video that more perfectly captures sexy and sad at the same time, or if two people have ever looked better than Chris Isaak and Helena Christensen. A masterwork in making you think you’re seeing more than you actually are, Ritts’ video depicted a couple that, upon first blush, seem to be wildly into each other, until you notice that Christensen refuses to ever look into Isaak’s (shatteringly soulful) eyes, and is literally running away from him at the end.

The song became a hit, but the Ritts video was an even bigger hit, winning an MTV Video Award for Best Male Video and Best Cinematography. The world had finally figured out what I, a lowly record store clerk² from New Jersey, already knew: that Chris Isaak would be a huge star.

Well, sort of.

Though Isaak remains a critic’s darling, and maintains a loyal fanbase, the closest he would come to duplicating the success of “Wicked Game” was with the release of “Baby Did a Bad, Bad Thing,” which was also connected to a movie, when it was used in the trailer for 1999’s Eyes Wide Shut (and also made it look way more sexy than it actually was). But for a one-hit wonder, you could do worse than being described as “the most influential love song in modern music.” I’ve seen Isaak perform live four times (and met him twice, and both times I was stunned by his good looks into homina homina homina babbling), and he seems both well aware of and not at all displeased that it’s the song that made him famous. That opening twang (created by Isaak’s longtime bandmate James Calvin Wilsey, who sadly passed away in 2018) has a Pavlovian effect on people, except instead of drooling, they burst into tears.

There have also been many, many covers of it.

Many covers. Like, close to 100, and that was only what I could find on Spotify. Some of them have become minor hits on their own, like one by Finnish goth rockers HIM, and another by the English-Irish girl group Girls Aloud. I thought it would be fun to attempt to work my way through all of them. Then, about a third of the way through, I realized that was actually not a very good idea. Partly it was because it would take up to 7 hours to listen to nearly 100 covers of “Wicked Game,” and I didn’t want to turn a song that’s very special to me into an endurance contest.

But also (and related to the endurance contest aspect), it’s simply because (and I’m sure you’ll be utterly gobsmacked to read this) most of them aren’t very good.

The Girls Aloud cover is okay, though it seems to have been recorded specifically for someone to put on a playlist called “Sex Music.” I mean, I suppose you could have sex to “Wicked Game” (though you could have sex to the theme from “What’s Happening!!” too, if you’re horny enough), but so much of what makes the original so powerful is in its yearning. It’s a song to listen to when you’re lying in bed at night staring at the ceiling and thinking about someone you want but can’t have. It sounds lonely.

The HIM cover, on the other hand, is a bunch of faux-metal nonsense, and sounds like it should have been on the soundtrack for Queen of the Damned, though it somehow wasn’t. Like the Girls Aloud cover, it seems to be missing a core element of what makes the original special, that sense of desire and loss. They’re both covers on strictly a lyrical basis, while gutting Isaak’s version of its emotional elements. But on the other hand, they’re still more listenable than a lot of other takes on it.

Perhaps the most puzzling aspect of the many, many covers of “Wicked Game” is how many of them consist of bored-sounding female vocals (possibly AI-generated) set to a Casio oontz oontz oontz beat. I’m not sure why anyone would listen to the lyrics and think “This can only be improved by remixing it into a soulless Eurotrash dance song,” but apparently quite a few people have over the past two decades. Others are just exercises in “Why did you even bother?” roteness, where you can all but hear the singer saying “Look, Mom, I can hit a high note!” The song has been juiced like an orange of all of its emotion.

I also had no idea how many different ways it was possible to pronounce the word “fire” until I started this endeavor. There’s the normal pronunciation “fi-er,” but I’ve since heard “fi-uh,” “fi-yah,” “faar,” and the just plain lazy “fi.” What a journey this has been!

I did encounter a few worthwhile nuggets though. For instance, I had no idea Tenacious D did a cover of it. It’s short, under two minutes long, and while Jack Black insists on singing “What a wicked THANG to do,” the guitar is solid. You also wouldn’t expect a reggae cover of “Wicked Game” to be any good, and yet Jamaican Reggae Cuts’ version is kind of a jam. So too was Il Divo’s majestic opera cover, sung in Italian, as well as Virtuoso’s instrumental all-strings version of it.

The version by white rapper JiggyJoe is about as awful as you can imagine, however, and probably worse than that.

I eventually narrowed down my favorite covers to three, all of them very different from each other. The first is a stripped-down “one guy and an acoustic guitar” version by James Vincent McMorrow that was featured in a trailer for season 6 of Game of Thrones. I had no idea about that until this very minute, but either way it perfectly captures heartache in every quavering note.

The second, by The Newton Brothers and Daisy Gray, is one of those oontz oontz oontz covers I mentioned earlier, but it’s exceedingly catchy. Featured in Mike Flanagan’s take on The Fall of the House of Usher, it plays in the scene where the audience is introduced to Carla Gugino as a smoking hot angel of death, just before the first asshole Usher kid is melted with acid out of a sprinkler system. I don’t know if it’s a great cover of “Wicked Game,” exactly, but it’s a decadent and muscular song on its own, the perfect soundtrack for cocaine and mistakes you’ll regret in the morning.

But, after some careful thinking, I’ve decided that the best cover of “Wicked Game” is this dramatic, wildly romantic version by Ursine Vulpine, which apparently was featured on an episode of Lucifer, a television show I have never seen.

I mean, good lord. That operatic voice, those sweeping strings, those backing vocals during the last chorus. It is shattering, and how it hasn’t ended up on the soundtrack for a vampire movie yet is beyond me. It’s completely different in every possible way from the original, slowed down and almost baroque, and yet both best capture the ache and the drama of a love that will only cause you pain in the end. Nobody loves no one? Quite the opposite: we love too much, and sometimes it sucks.

1. The rest of it is pretty good, with some Angelo Badalamenti instrumentals, two songs in which Nicolas Cage does his best Elvis impersonation, and another Chris Isaak track called “Blue Spanish Sky.”

2. I don’t think I was even working there anymore by the time the Ritts video came ou