"Wicked Game" is a 1989 song by Chris Isaak from his third studio album Heart Shaped World. Despite being released as a single in 1989, it did not become a hit until it was later featured in the David Lynch film Wild at Heart (1990). Lee Chesnut, an Atlanta radio station music director who loved David Lynch films, began playing the song and it quickly became a nationwide top ten hit in January 1991, reaching #6 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, making it the only hit song of his career in the U.S. James Calvin Wilsey played the distinctive lead guitar solo on the song.
The song is written in the mode of B Dorian. Through several years, many different versions and arrangements of the song were made before the final version was released. Both the bassline and drums (except the cymbals) were sampled from previous recordings of the song and then looped.
Famous quotes containing the words wicked game, wicked and/or game:
“Every great love brings with it the cruel idea of killing the object of its love so that it may be removed once and for all from the wicked game of change: for love dreads change even more than annihilation.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“Society has quite forsaken all her wicked courses,
Which empties our police courts, and abolishes divorces.”
—Sir William Schwenck Gilbert (1836–1911)
“There are no accidents, only nature throwing her weight around. Even the bomb merely releases energy that nature has put there. Nuclear war would be just a spark in the grandeur of space. Nor can radiation “alter” nature: she will absorb it all. After the bomb, nature will pick up the cards we have spilled, shuffle them, and begin her game again.”
—Camille Paglia (b. 1947)