She voiced an unforgettable song. Then she disappeared. New film revives mysterious N.J. singer.

It starts with drums, and a series of otherworldly pings.

They pierce the gauzy synth, bouncing around like coiled springs in an offbeat lullaby.

Then comes the voice — a voice so smooth and strong, it’s impossible to turn away.

Soulful “oohs” give way to contemplative lyrics and a commanding chorus.

“Goodbye horses, I’m flying over you,” the rich voice trumpets as a dreamy, dark wave soundscape envelops the words, ascending to the heavens.

The song “Goodbye Horses” is best known as the fanciful soundtrack for serial killer Buffalo Bill’s naked dance in the 1991 Oscar-winning movie “The Silence of the Lambs.” But the ethereal, floating, spiritual quality of the song transcended the scene to become a portal to a realm of mystery and awe.

Mystery also followed the person singing the song.

Who was the artist, Q Lazzarus? And where did they go?

Eva Aridjis Fuentes didn’t know it, but she was about to find out.

Aridjis Fuentes is the director of the documentary “Goodbye Horses: The Many Lives of Q Lazzarus,” screening in New York and New Jersey this month (see theaters and dates below).

In 2019, the filmmaker called a car service to her apartment building in Park Slope, Brooklyn. She would normally take the subway, but she was running late and needed to get to SoHo in Manhattan.

The driver who picked her up was a Black woman in her late 50s. She was playing a Neil Young CD and had a whole music collection in her car.

Aridjis Fuentes thought of a story she read months earlier from the website Dazed about Q Lazzarus.

Lazzarus, aka Diane Luckey, was the New York singer of the song “Goodbye Horses.” Originally from New Jersey, she had seemingly vanished without a trace after her music was featured in director Jonathan Demme’s films.

A woman proclaiming to be Luckey had messaged Dazed to say that she was in fact the former Q Lazzarus and was working as a bus driver in Staten Island, but didn’t want anything to do with music anymore.

Aridjis Fuentes, who grew up in Mexico City in the ’80s, had played “Goodbye Horses” all the time when she worked as a DJ in New York.

When her driver’s GPS failed and she started going the wrong way, it came out that she lived in Staten Island.

She looked at the woman and wondered — could she be Q Lazzarus?

She asked the driver if she’d heard of the singer. She had, though she didn’t seem too keen to talk about that.

But when they got to Manhattan, the woman extended her hand.

“Nice to meet you, Eva,” she said.

“I’m Q.”

‘Her legacy is in my hands’

The next morning, the director got a call:

“Hi Eva, it’s Q. I had a dream about you last night.”

Q — Diane Luckey — had said her concert days were behind her, but in the dream, she was performing again.

They met for lunch and struck up a friendship. Luckey, who hailed from Neptune, decided that she would finally tell her story in a film to be directed by Aridjis Fuentes.

She would also explain why Q Lazzarus disappeared for 25 years — “What went wrong and happened … The truth," as she says in the film.

Luckey died three years later, at 61, before the film was finished.

Now the documentary, told mostly in her words, has her making a kind of homecoming in Asbury Park and New York’s East Village.

Both Luckey and Aridjis Fuentes came to see their meeting as fated. The singer, who had long put away the musical part of herself, even once going by a different name, took the director recognizing her as a sign to return to her passion.

“I really felt blessed and lucky that I got to meet her and that she entrusted me with her story,” Aridjis Fuentes tells NJ Advance Media.

“It became a very big responsibility once she passed away. I felt like a lot of her legacy is in my hands now.”

The film enabled the resurrection of Q Lazzarus and her dream, both before and after her death.

“When you go after your dream, there’s nothing like it,” Luckey says in the film. “There’s good times and there’s bad times, but there’s nothing like it.”

The director wanted to share the singer’s charming storytelling, sense of humor and indefatigable spirit with the world — “and do her justice, let her tell her story,” she says.

Aridjis Fuentes became the first person to hear the trove of unreleased music that Luckey had made years ago, music that is featured throughout the documentary. Each beat of the story boasts another song.

Despite the popularity of “Goodbye Horses,” Q Lazzarus, whose work includes the sounds of new wave, hard rock, dance and more, never got a record deal. But before her sudden death in 2022, Luckey knew that dream was at long last in the process of becoming a reality.

Music she recorded in the ’80s and ‘90s is now being heard on an album for the first time through the film’s soundtrack, “Goodbye Horses: The Many Lives of Q Lazzarus,” released Feb. 21 by Sacred Bones Records.

Aridjis Fuentes' favorite part of the five and a half years of making the film was watching Luckey listen to her music on tape and tell the stories behind each song. She was laughing, crying and singing along — “being reminded of how talented she was.”

“I think everyone’s really surprised by her range,” she says. “There’s just all these different genres of music ... she was full of surprises.”

Luckey’s son, James Luckey Lange, appears in the film. He shows his mother the popularity of her song on the internet — recordings and videos that she wasn’t getting paid for, despite her instantly recognizable voice. He first realized how big his mother’s song was when he heard it in a video game.

“She was on her way to becoming something major and now everything’s just gone,” he says in the film.

Now Q’s son and family are finally receiving royalties from her music.

Aridjis Fuentes calls the release of the film and album bittersweet.

“She should be here for this moment and she’s not.”

The cab ride that changed everything

The story of finding Luckey in the driver’s seat that fateful day in 2019 seems like a scene from a movie.

It also echoes another life-changing ride.

Jonathan Demme hailed a cab from Luckey in the ’80s, when she was working as a taxi driver.

Luckey was playing her own music in the cab. Demme — who would go on to win a best director Oscar for “The Silence of the Lambs” in 1992 — wanted to know who the singer was.

He ended up using her song “The Candle Goes Away” in his movie “Something Wild” (1986), starring Melanie Griffith, Jeff Daniels and Ray Liotta. That’s also how “Goodbye Horses” made it into Demme’s 1988 movie “Married to the Mob” starring Michelle Pfeiffer, Matthew Modine and Dean Stockwell.

He was so taken with the song that he used it a second time.

“Goodbye Horses” is now eternally linked with “The Silence of the Lambs,” starring Jodie Foster, Anthony Hopkins and Ted Levine as Jame Gumb, the serial killer Buffalo Bill, whose naked dance would enshrine the mystical tune in movie history.

Though the movie wasn’t the first of Demme’s films to use the Q Lazzarus music, it took “Lambs” for many people, including Aridjis Fuentes, to hear the song.

That wasn’t the end of Demme’s association with Luckey. He also cast her in his 1993 film “Philadelphia,” starring Tom Hanks and Denzel Washington. She can be seen belting out a mighty cover of the Talking Heads song “Heaven” in the movie.

Luckey’s collaborator, William Garvey, wrote both of the Q Lazzarus songs in Demme’s films.

Luckey and Garvey started writing songs together after meeting on the Lower East Side. On the night she recorded “Goodbye Horses,” she had been working all day, but rallied to keep going and showed up at Garvey’s home at 4 a.m.

“He told me ‘I’ve seen it rise, but it always falls. I’ve seen ‘em come, I’ve seen ‘em go,’” she sings in “Goodbye Horses.”

“He said ‘all things pass into the night,’” she sings.

Then comes a rebuke of a reply:

“And I said ‘oh, no, sir, I must say you’re wrong. I must disagree, oh, no, sir, I must say you’re wrong. Won’t you listen to me?‘”

The song, with Q’s recounting of a dialogue, can be about many things, Aridjis Fuentes says — life, death, love.

Garvey, the songwriter, died in 2009.

“It’s just a very mysterious song,” the director tells NJ Advance Media — “transcendent.”

“I feel like it’s a song that’s really been embraced by the goth community and the LGBT community,” she says.

As a DJ when she was younger, Aridjis Fuentes primarily experienced the song in the goth ’80s club scene.

“People would dance to it,” she says. “The reason the song has this cult following is because Q’s voice is very androgynous. A lot of people who hear it think it’s a white new wave guy singing. They don’t realize it’s a Black woman.”

“Goodbye Horses” was used in other films, including “Clerks II” (2006) from Luckey’s fellow Monmouth County native Kevin Smith. As Smith’s Silent Bob presses play on the song, Jason Mewes' character, Jay, emulates Buffalo Bill’s dance from “The Silence of the Lambs.”

“There must be, like, 20 or 30 covers of it by other bands,” Aridjis Fuentes says — she references a series of them in the documentary.

Rock ‘n’ roll heartbreak

While “Goodbye Horses” drew quite a dedicated fanbase, Luckey was most proud of her hard rock songs.

She wrote and performed them when she was living in London. It might seem like a departure for anyone familiar with the new wave style of “Goodbye Horses,” but for Luckey, it was who she was.

“She loved rock music,” Aridjis Fuentes says.

Growing up in Neptune as one of seven children, Luckey performed and traveled with the church choir from Mount Pisgah Baptist Temple in Asbury Park.

Her sister was into Dionne Warwick and Anita Baker, and she appreciated their music, too, but had dreams of rock stardom.

“You always wanted to be Rod Stewart‚” Luckey’s sister, Abbie Luckey, tells her in the documentary.

Q’s influences included heavy metal bands and Janis Joplin.

Luckey returned to Asbury Park with Aridjis Fuentes for the film. While her childhood church wasn’t open when they arrived, women who recognized her offered a warm greeting.

Though the director lives in New York and grew up in Mexico, she also has a New Jersey connection through Princeton University, where she lived while studying anthropology and comparative literature. She made her 2006 narrative film “The Favor” in Montclair, Bayonne and Cape May Courthouse.

Luckey moved to New York against her parents' wishes, to try and live out her dream.

She performed as Q Lazzarus and made music with Garvey, but labels wouldn’t sign her to a record deal, even after she managed to go the early ’90s equivalent of “viral” in “The Silence of the Lambs.”

“They weren’t ready for a Black rock ’n’ roll singer,” Luckey says in the film.

The white-dominated rock scene had seemingly forgotten the pioneering work of Black women like Sister Rosetta Tharpe, the Godmother of Rock ’n’ Roll, though Queen of Soul Aretha Franklin would become the first woman inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 1987 (Tharpe was inducted posthumously in 2018).

Luckey eventually moved to the United Kingdom, thinking England might be more friendly to her music.

In London, she found bandmates and nurtured her powerful rock sound as a frontwoman, regularly scorching the stage. But again, record labels just weren’t biting.

“I think she was ahead of her time,” Aridjis Fuentes says. “She had an amazing voice, she had amazing range, she had a great style ... she had an amazing presence on stage, was a great performer, but those opportunities eluded her.”

Record executives would say they didn’t know how to market Q Lazzarus — that she didn’t fit into any boxes.

“I think part of it was, at the time, the Black women who were big were Whitney Houston and people who were sort of doing more pop or R&B,” the director says. “I mean, Tina Turner also sort of had to go to Europe to do more rock stuff.

“But I think part of it was also that she was a large woman,” Aridjis Fuentes says. “She was 6 feet tall and large. And she was the frontwoman and the industry is very fickle and superficial ... no one had the vision or the intelligence to give her a record deal, to sign her. They didn’t know what to do with her.”

The director kept hearing the same thing from Q’s old bandmates and friends — it was constant rejection.

“From what I understand, between Jonathan Demme in LA and (Q’s) manager in England, they went to all the big record labels,” she says (Demme died in 2017). “I do wonder, are any of them gonna see this film and think about that and feel ashamed?”

Especially, she says, given what happened next.

Disappearing

It was hard for Q to keep hope going when she was always being shut down.

But the invitation to be in Demme’s “Philadelphia” brought her back to the U.S., to Philadelphia, where she lived for a time with her manager and boyfriend Richard, who she’d met in the UK.

She tried the American music scene again, recording dance songs with her friend Danny Z (Dan Agren) that made good use of her rock swagger and stirring voice.

She had started using drugs and drinking in her relationship with Richard. Then, when he decided to leave Philly and return to the UK to see family, he never came back.

Luckey descended into a deep depression and addiction took over.

She had also been left out of the “Philadelphia” soundtrack, which featured artists like Bruce Springsteen, who won an Oscar for the song “Streets of Philadelphia."

Q’s credit in the film: “Party singer.”

She decided to abandon her music, and cut ties so completely that her bandmates and friends had no idea what happened.

She was just gone.

“I disappeared because I had to,” Luckey says in the film.

Pain fueled addiction, and addiction took everything she had away. She didn’t want anyone to see her like that, so she blotted out her old life, refusing to listen to her music for 25 years. She even changed her name to Pam.

Her drug habit got her kicked out of the place she was staying. She would climb the gate at New York’s St. Mark’s Church-in-the-Bowery and sleep outside the building. Cocaine led her to places she swore she’d never go.

She was at a low point, she says in the film, when she met her future husband, Robert Lange.

She didn’t tell him about her music.

Flying over you

After a period of rehab, Luckey tried to start fresh with Lange and their son, James.

She began a new chapter as a bus driver in Staten Island.

When one of her co-workers said they recognized her in “Philadelphia,” she denied being in the film.

Aridjis Fuentes, who is touring with the documentary, was surprised when the same bus driver showed up for a screening in San Francisco.

Plenty of people had been looking for Q Lazzarus for years. They couldn’t find her even when she was right in front of them.

Then, just as she planned to reemerge with the film and a New York concert reunion with her UK bandmates, life had other plans.

After undergoing hip surgery, Luckey fell and broke her leg, had to have more surgery and developed an infection.

She was put in a medically induced coma and died of sepsis in 2022.

The last time Aridjis Fuentes spoke to Luckey, she was in a rehab and fully expected to come home, not be rushed to the hospital.

Devastated by the loss of her friend, the director also lost some of the financial backing for the documentary because of her passing.

Driven to bring Luckey’s story to the screen, she launched a Kickstarter and was able to raise $102,000 to complete the work.

As Luckey’s family attends her burial in the film, “Goodbye Horses” plays, letting her voice fly free once again.

“He told me ‘I’ve seen it all before,‘” she sings. “‘I’ve been there, I’ve seen my hopes and dreams lying on the ground. I’ve seen the sky just begin to fall.‘ He said ’all things pass into the night.‘”

But then comes that forceful, triumphant rebuke.

A refusal to go quietly, a call to survival, and, through the music itself, eternal life:

“And I said ‘oh, no, sir, I must say you’re wrong. I must disagree, oh, no, sir, I must say you’re wrong.'

“‘Won’t you listen to me?‘”

“Goodbye Horses: The Many Lives of Q Lazzarus“ comes to New York’s Village East by Angelika March 14 to 20 and Asbury Park’s ShowRoom Cinema March 22 and 23. There will be Q&As with director Eva Aridjis Fuentes after the March 14, 15, 20 and 22 screenings; visit goodbyehorsesmovie.com

The soundtrack album “Goodbye Horses: The Many Lives of Q Lazzarus“ is available from Sacred Bones Records.

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Amy Kuperinsky may be reached at akuperinsky@njadvancemedia.com and followed at @AmyKup on Twitter/X, @amykup.bsky.social on Bluesky and @kupamy on Instagram and Threads.