Stacey Q

Swain was born on November 30, 1958, in the Orange County suburb of Fullerton, California. She is the youngest of three children. Her mother, Joyce, bred Cardigan Welsh Corgis that have appeared in Hollywood films and television. In a 1989 interview, Swain said she was three years old when she asked for dance lessons, but had to wait until she was five, when she did classical ballet. In 1969, she became the youngest member of the Dance Theater of Orange County, a local company that performed at benefit shows in Anaheim. After graduating from high school in 1976, Swain joined the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus, where she performed as a showgirl in her first year, and as an elephant rider in her second year. Her first singing project was a Los Angeles radio spot where she introduced and announced programs while impersonating members of The Go-Go's. ==Career==

1981–1984: Q, SSQ and Playback In 1981, Swain was introduced to Jon St. James, the proprietor of Fullerton's Casbah Recording Studio, which hosted recordings for the bands Berlin and Social Distortion. St. James was developing a synthpop group called Q, named after the James Bond character. The band consisted of St. James on guitars, and Dan Van Patten and John Van Tongeren on vocoder and synthesizer. She served as the assistant producer on the band's four tracks for The Q EP when St. James realized they needed a vocalist for their first track "Sushi", which Swain provided as she had previously recorded demos at his studio. The Q EP received little airplay except on college radio. Its success led St. James and Swain to develop more songs. In 1997, Swain released the album Boomerang, which reflected her experiences in Tibet, as well as her conversion to Buddhism. She also released a cover of a Janis Ian tune called "Tenderness", which reached number 5 on the Jamaican charts. In 2000, she played the lead female character Yeshe Tsogyal in a production of The Life of Padmasambhava by the San Francisco-based Namsay Dorje Theater Company. In September 2022, Stacey's Better Than Heaven album was re-released with bonus tracks and remixes. ==Discography==

;Solo studio albums • Better Than Heaven (1986) • Hard Machine (1988) • Nights Like This (1989) • Boomerang (1997) • Color Me Cinnamon (2010) ;SSQ • Playback (1983) • Jet Town Je t’aime (2020) ==Filmography==