‘Goodbye Horses’ Fascinatingly Explores ‘The Many Lives of Q Lazzarus’ │ Exclaim!

One night in 1987, the late filmmaker Jonathan Demme (Stop Making Sense, The Silence of the Lambs) and producer Arthur Baker stepped out of a blizzard and got into a cab where Diane Luckey, a 25-year-old burgeoning artist, happened to be sitting behind the wheel. More concerned with her own music, she ignored the pair’s conversation, testing lyrics aloud, practically belting, before the car went silent.

“Oh my god,” Demme said, before introducing himself and giving her his card.

She was Q Lazzarus, an eclectic performer with an androgynous, baritone voice, and an eventual cult sensation. Her music would go on to appear in four of Demme’s films, the last being an appearance in 1993’s Philadelphia, with her cover of Talking Heads’ song “Heaven.” She disappeared from the public eye three years later; nobody knew where she had gone.

In strange turn of events, in 2019, documentarian Eva Aridjis-Fuentes called a car service. With Neil Young playing in the background, Aridjis-Fuentes asked the driver if she’d ever seen the Toronto-born singer live — and then asked about Q Lazzarus. The driver carefully steered the conversation elsewhere and, upon arriving in Manhattan, she shook Aridjis-Fuentes’s hand and said, “Nice to meet you, Eva. I’m Q.”

For many listeners (present company, very much included), Q Lazzarus exists as an enigma; an untraceable star, whose music was responsible for an unmeasurable vibe that bettered everything it touched, from Silence of the Lambs to Skate 3. Aridjis-Fuentes’s documentary provides the salve to our single question when it comes to the artist: what happened?

Led by Aridjis-Fuentes and Q herself, Goodbye Horses: The Many Lives of Q Lazzarus traces the artist’s life in music, and the mystery of her sudden disappearance. An elongated testimony of the rise, fall and aborted return of Q Lazzarus, the film offers a window into a tragically under-documented artist, one whose image was deemed unmarketable by record labels and music executives.

But Q, infinitely charismatic on and off the stage, unpretentious and humble when reminiscing on her past successes, embodies a star. She draws listeners and those around her in like a magnet. Aridjis-Fuentes captures this energy perfectly, recording her colloquially as if shooting a home video. Using archival footage of 1980s New York and talking head interviews from Q’s friends, family and collaborators, the documentary plays like an episode of 60 Minutes at times, rendering a lived life into a straightforward, but often plain, explanation. Goodbye Horses: The Many Lives of Q Lazzarus serves as a confession on film, one that Aridjis-Fuentes chooses to present with unpretentious candour.

Like Demme before her, Aridjis-Fuentes — and everyone else who has heard the film’s titular song — knows its power. Ask anyone who loves it, and they can attribute the song to an exact time and place in their lives. Through Aridjis-Fuentes’s film, “Goodbye Horses” takes on new meanings — ones that can be attributed to any of Q’s many lives.

While not as transcendent as the track from which it gets its name, Goodbye Horses: The Many Lives of Q Lazzarus is necessary lore for one of the greatest songs, and perhaps performers, of all time.