Chris Isaak

Just like some filmmakers knowingly make chick flicks, Chris Isaak, San Joaquin County’s best-known contribution to the milieu of international celebrity, makes … well, he certainly hasn’t been aiming his records at a target demographic of E Clampus Vitus members, has he? For a long time, Isaak made and remade the same album—his beautiful, Roy Orbison-like voice floating over former producer Erik Jacobsen’s sparse arrangements, the total sounding like the aural equivalent of a book of Bruce Weber photographs. That’s changed. On Always Got Tonight, producer John Shanks has fashioned a disc that’s closer to the kind of big, glossy, suburb ’n’ western/pop hybrid that Mutt Lange painstakingly assembles for his wife, Shania Twain. It’s a nice collection of tunes, most of which Isaac aims at fashionably attired women and the men who will follow them anywhere. Will it make Isaak a bigger star? Maybe.