In this album’s first song, “Baby Did a Bad Thing,” the bad thing Chris Isaak’s baby has done to him is so “low down” that he can’t even bring himself to say what it is. But the 12 songs that follow spill the beans: Isaak’s baby-are you ready for this?-has left him, I know, it’s hard to believe, what with Isaak’s matinee-idol profile and platinum pompadour. But if you have any doubts, the river of tears that irrigates (and at times nearly drowns) the rest of the album should wash them away.

As usual, Forever Blue finds Isaak mining the rich reserves of his rockabilIy record collection for a sound somewhere between Roy Orbison and Cliff Richard, which is to say one that’s half inspired original and half inspired fake. But never before has he gone so singlemindedly for the True Confessions audience. ‘Somebody’s Crying” is the hit, but somebody’s also crying in “Graduation Day,” “Don’t leave Me On My Own,” “Things Go Wrong,” “Changed Your Mind” “Shadows in a Mirror” “I Believe” the tide cut, and “The End of Everything.” And that somebody is Isaak.

Granted, he does have an appealing way of sneaking ’60s guitar riffs into what are supposed to be evocations of the ’50s sensitive-loner stance. But the two best songs here are the only two, aside from “Baby Did a Bad Thing,” in which he abandons sneakiness and sensitivity altogether and loses his temper: “Go Walking Down There” (a challenge to all the happy people” to see how much they like it down at the end of lonely Street) and ‘Goin’ Nowhere,” a jilted lover’s salacious and rocking proposition to a street-walking “girl who’d look better naked” that Hugh Grant could’ve written himself.