For years, it was one of pop music’s most persistent mysteries: Whatever happened to Q Lazzarus? And furthermore: Who was she in the first place?
Most listeners who had heard of the genre-bending artist — if they’d heard of her at all — encountered her song “Goodbye Horses” in Jonathan Demme’s 1991 blockbuster “The Silence of the Lambs” as the backdrop to the scene where the serial killer Buffalo Bill applies makeup and poses strikingly nude. The creepy new wave track, with its minor-key, sci-fi synths and androgynous vocals, harmonized impeccably with the scene’s ominous visuals.
“Goodbye Horses” was the only single Q Lazzarus officially released on a physical format while she was alive, but it came with an incredible story: Demme had encountered the musician at her day job — as a taxi driver — and fell in love with the music she played during the ride. But after her song’s star turn in his film, Q Lazzarus’s career stalled, and by the mid-90s, she had seemingly vanished entirely.
Some fans and journalists made efforts to track down this enigmatic voice over the years, but the filmmaker who ended up telling her story in the new documentary “Goodbye Horses: The Many Lives of Q Lazzarus” met the artist born Diane Luckey the same way Demme did: in her cab.
“Getting into her car was a completely coincidental or fated, as Q and I both felt, meeting,” Eva Aridjis Fuentes, the movie’s director, said in an interview. The two sang along to Neil Young’s “Heart of Gold”; Aridjis Fuentes thought the woman behind the wheel looked familiar, and asked if she’d ever seen Q Lazzarus. They formed a friendship that resulted in Aridjis Fuentes’s film, which opens in a handful of cities including London, Los Angeles and New York next month, with a streaming release expected to follow. On Friday, the Brooklyn record label Sacred Bones will release its soundtrack — effectively the first full-length Q Lazzarus release.
“We’re doing this documentary to let you know what went wrong and what happened,” Luckey says in the film. “The truth” about why she disappeared: “Because I had to.”
“The Many Lives of Q Lazzarus” is built out of about 100 hours of footage Aridjis Fuentes shot from the fall of 2019 through the end of 2022, as well as archival material from Luckey’s would-be heyday, including nearly two dozen unreleased recordings from the approximately 10 years she made music. What the director uncovered were not just unheard songs from a stunningly versatile artist, but a story about the devastating consequences of not achieving one’s dream.
“She was trying and trying to get her voice heard, and trying hard to get noticed, and it just never happened for her, and so it makes this release feel even more meaningful,” Caleb Braaten, the owner of Sacred Bones, said in an interview. The soundtrack shows off Luckey’s versatility, her husky voice drifting between rock, new wave, house and adult contemporary.
Luckey wanted to be a singer from childhood. Born in 1960, she grew up in Neptune Township, N.J., and sang in her church choir. At 18, she moved to New York to try to make it in music and met William Garvey, with whom she recorded “Goodbye Horses,” and Dan Agren, who was her backup dancer for performances at East Village haunts like the Pyramid Club and Boy Bar.
“You could just sort of hum a melody, and she would just right away put the music to it,” Agren said in an interview. Luckey, who sang and played keyboards, gigged around New York, and also formed a band named Q Lazzarus in the late ’80s in London. “She couldn’t perform at 50 percent,” Jon Bouillot, that band’s bassist, said in an interview. “Everything she performed was 100 percent.”
Luckey’s biggest break came during a 1986 snowstorm, when she picked up Demme and the musician Arthur Baker in her cab. That chance meeting led to the inclusion of Q Lazzarus music in four of his films: “Something Wild” (1986), “Married to the Mob” (1988), “Silence of the Lambs” (1991) and “Philadelphia” from 1993, in which Luckey appears, singing a cover of the Talking Heads’ “Heaven.”
“He truly believed in her and wanted to help promote her,” Suzana Perić, the music editor of those four films, said in an interview. Perić was first tasked with finding a place for “Goodbye Horses” in “Married to the Mob,” but it was an even better fit for “The Silence of the Lambs” (the Buffalo Bill character sings along to it). “That particular song stuck with all of us,” Perić said.
“Goodbye Horses” captured listeners’ imaginations, later appearing in the soundtrack of the video game Grand Theft Auto IV, a 2016 Gucci ad campaign and an episode of “Family Guy.” It has been covered frequently, by artists including MGMT and Jon Hopkins. Kele Okereke, the lead singer of Bloc Party, included a Euro-disco-inflected remake of this “weird, magical song” on his 2011 solo EP “The Hunter.”
“I still don’t really kind of understand what the song is about,” Okereke said. “I just love the images.” Josh Cheon, the owner of Dark Entries Records, which is releasing a 12” of “Goodbye Horses” this month, called it “an anthem for the underground” and “a rallying call” for misfits.
But the track failed to nab Luckey the thing she needed more than anything else: a record deal. “I just think it was something that couldn’t be pigeonholed,” Bouillot said of Luckey. At the time, “Black women were supposed to be singing R&B or pop; they’re supposed to look like Whitney Houston,” Aridjis Fuentes said. “People didn’t really know what to do with her.” After her stint in London, Luckey returned to the U.S. and recorded house music with Agren, but again, no deal materialized.
“She was just over it,” Agren remembered. By the mid-90s, Luckey had a considerable drug habit; after abandoning music, she spent time living on the street and doing sex work, and went to jail and rehab. She eventually turned her life around and settled into obscurity on Staten Island with her husband and son, James Luckey-Lange.
“If she would have continued in the industry, she felt like she probably would have went on more of a downward spiral,” Luckey-Lange said in an interview. He echoed what the film suggests were the reasons she had to vanish: a combination of a failed romantic relationship and feeling “cast aside because she didn’t fit the molds” of the music industry. (Another blow: Her cover of “Heaven” was not included on the platinum “Philadelphia” soundtrack.)
Once she started a family, Luckey kept her past in the past — Luckey-Lange said that most of the documentary was news to him, and that his mother rarely played music when he was growing up.
But the documentary gave her a fresh spark. In the film, Luckey says that her meeting with Aridjis Fuentes was the first time since abandoning music “that I said, ‘You know what? I’m proud of Q Lazzarus. Let me pick this bitch back up.’”
Galvanized by the movie, Luckey was ready to reform the British iteration of Q Lazzarus — but then Covid-19 hit, putting plans of a reunion show on hold. Luckey broke her leg in a fall and later died of sepsis in a hospital in July 2022, Luckey-Lange said.
He remains vigilant about royalties. The rights of “Goodbye Horses” are owned by MGM, the studio that acquired Orion, which released “The Silence of the Lambs.” Garvey, who died in 2009, is listed as its sole writer on its single, released by a label called All Nations Records in 1991. In the documentary, Luckey maintains that “except from the movies,” she never saw any money from the song.
Mon Amie Records reissued the song on vinyl and onto streaming services in 2013 after licensing it from MGM, followed by a release of Q Lazzarus demos that the label received from Luckey’s former manager. Mona Dehghan, who operates Mon Amie, said she felt compelled to release “Goodbye Horses” because “everyone needs to hear this song — it’s, like, one of the greatest songs of all time.” She said she had tried to reach out to Luckey “so many times” to give her earnings from the song. Luckey-Lange said he hadn’t heard from Dehghan.
The documentary has an opportunity to bring Q Lazzarus’s music and story to a new generation. “She lived through all these really heavy things and disappointments and she wasn’t jaded,” Aridjis Fuentes said. And with the film and music finally coming out, Luckey-Lange noted, “That’s sort of like her final say.”
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