It’s hard to know what to expect when you sit down to chat with Chris Isaak. Not because he is particularly aloof – in fact, the man is about as gregarious as they come – but because his career has so many facets.
There is The X Factor judge currently charming screens. There is the respected roustabout unveiling his 13th studio album, coupled with the earlier crooner lamenting wicked games and bad, bad things. There is the actor, enlisted by talents as disparate as David Lynch and Adventure Time. There is the guy sketching Charles Addams cartoons in the corner. Mostly, though – and perhaps this above everything else – there is the Chris Isaak who likes to tell stories.
“I was over in Nashville,” he recalls, “and I went to Scotty Moore’s house, who was Elvis’ original guitar player in the ’50s. He had a box of 78s, and they belonged to Elvis when he was just a kid. We were just sitting around the kitchen playing them. And you could hear everything that Elvis did later on in his career was on those records. And those sounds might be far apart, with a big dichotomy between one another, but he put them all together in his voice and style, and it was something new. I think that’s what a lot of artists do. They take a lot of influences and people, they pour ’em into themselves, and that makes them unique.”
Isaak himself has drawn on an incredible array of music to shape the man he is today. From Elvis and Louis Armstrong, to the fledgling performers he spends offscreen time with on The X Factor, the Californian singer has a deep bag of influences at his disposal. These many years later, while he has succeeded in crafting a sound of his own, his allegiance to earlier music remains strong. There is perhaps no better example of this than his homage to Roy Orbison, ‘Perfect Lover’, which appears on his new album, First Comes The Night.
“Man, I wish Roy was still here. I would have loved to have him come in and sing on that,” Isaak says. “He was the nicest man I’ve ever worked with. He was such a sweet guy in real life, and you know, when he died I was young enough to think, ‘Well, he lived a full life, he did all this stuff.’ And now I think what an idiot I was. He was only 52 when he died. He was young!
“In real life he was part-redneck and part-poet. Seriously, I think I got along better with Roy than most other people I’ve ever met. The two of us just hit it off like a couple of ducks. We could talk about music, and we could talk about cars, we could talk about guns, we could talk about women. One time he told me, ‘People always ask me what kind of a singer I am, and I tell them I’m a romantic balladeer.’ Someone had told him that, and he liked it. I told him, ‘Well, I’m going to start calling myself that too, Roy. That’s what we are. We’re romantic balladeers.’”
While Isaak’s new record is not without its share of ballads, there is something inherently energetic to the release. Across happy tunes and sad, Isaak has endeavoured to make each song entertaining. While each track stands alone, there is still an overarching tone that soon becomes apparent; it feels very cinematic. Unsurprising, given his forays into the world of film, including that most idiosyncratic of landscapes, the terrain of David Lynch.
“You know, when I hear the term Renaissance Man, I think of David Lynch. He can do everything. I’ve worked with some great directors, like Bertolucci, and David Lynch is really one of the most impressive. He could take a scene apart and put it back together in an instant, and have the actors giving better performances with really simple direction. Very insightful. He can write, he can put music together. He’d come in and say, ‘What if the guitar did this here? Can we make it go baaa-OOO?’ He was such fun to work with. People always think he’s going to be this dark and crazy guy. It’s never the guys who make dark and crazy films who are dark and crazy themselves. The people you need to watch out for is the cub scout leader who’s also a clown at children’s birthday parties. Watch out for that guy.”
Despite, or perhaps because of this mix of achievements, Isaak is still drawn to times when music was simpler – when the stage lights were still a dream, no-one cared for your name; when all that mattered in that moment was the song.
“I find myself playing on the street, even now,” he says. “My older brother called and said, ‘Bring your guitar and we’ll make enough money for breakfast.’ So we drove down to this beachside town, we opened up the case there on the street, and just started playing. We both had hats on, we were both singing, and no-one was making a big deal out of it. We got some tips, and almost had enough for breakfast, when this girl walks by with her boyfriend. I saw her look back, and she said, ‘That’s Chris Isaak!’ And her boyfriend just nodded and said, ‘Yep. He used to be big.’ And kept on walking. I thought that was hilarious.”
First Comes The Night by Chris Isaak is now through Universal.
