San Francisco, CA · outsider synth-pop

The Space Lady

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Casio-and-helmet street-performance legend — cosmic covers of pure innocence, outsider-music history glowing softly live, pure wonder with no irony.

The Space Lady is Susan Dietrich Schneider, born in 1948 and once known on stage as Suzy Soundz. In the 1960s she hitchhiked to San Francisco, getting a ride from musician Joel Dunsany, who performed as the Cosmic Man and later became her husband for three decades; he wrote her signature song 'Synthesize Me'. She began as a street musician accompanying her soprano voice on accordion.

She performed for years in Boston and then in San Francisco, playing a Casio keyboard run through phaser and delay while wearing a winged helmet. Fans and a newspaper contest gave her the name Space Lady, and she had switched from accordion to a Casiotone keyboard in 1983. Her repertoire is built mostly on covers, 'Major Tom', 'Ghost Riders in the Sky', 'Fly Like an Eagle', sung in a clear, unaffected voice over slow, drifting arpeggios.

She retired from music in 2000 and returned to Colorado to care for her aging parents, later earning a nursing degree and working as a charge nurse. Her only connection to music was selling cassette recordings to passers-by, until historian Irwin Chusid included one of her covers on his outsider-music compilation Songs in the Key of Z, drawing renewed attention to a performer whose whereabouts had become uncertain.

In 2008 she met Eric Schneider, a songwriter who had never heard of the Space Lady; the two married the following year. In 2012 he urged her out of retirement, and an email to more than a thousand fans announcing her return brought offers from two European labels. Night School Records released The Space Lady's Greatest Hits in 2013, and she began touring again in 2014. The effect remains gentle and unironic, closer to devotional than novelty.

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outsider synth-pop