Stevie Nicks picked up a paperback, liked a name in it, and had a finished song about ten minutes later. She did not know at the time that the name belonged to a figure from Welsh mythology who matched almost exactly what she had written.
Here is where the name came from, why she called Rhiannon a witch when she was not one, and how the drum track was assembled with a razor blade.
The Short Answer
A woman nobody can hold onto. The song describes someone ruled by the wind, who takes you over and cannot be kept, offering something transcendent that is never quite delivered. Nicks has described her as a celestial being, not of this world, without being able to say precisely who she was.
The Story Behind the Song
Nicks wrote it in 1974, about three months before she and Lindsey Buckingham joined Fleetwood Mac. She composed it at a piano and recorded a cassette demo.
The name came from Triad, a 1973 supernatural novel by the American writer Mary Bartlet Leader, in which a woman called Branwen is possessed by the spirit of another woman named Rhiannon. Nicks has described it as a paperback she found lying around at somebody’s house.
Her account of the writing is that she stopped at the name, thought it was beautiful, and ten minutes later had the whole song. The band recorded it for the self-titled 1975 album that introduced the Buckingham and Nicks line-up, and it became their first American number one album.
Is Rhiannon a witch?
Nicks called her one on stage for years, introducing the song as being about an old Welsh witch. The mythological Rhiannon is not a witch at all.
In the Mabinogion, the collection of medieval Welsh prose tales, Rhiannon is a queen associated with horses and with three magical birds whose singing has extraordinary effects. Nicks has said she did not learn any of this until 1978, years after the song was a hit.
Her own summary is that she wrote about a celestial being, that she did not know exactly who Rhiannon was but knew she was not of this world, and that when the mythology turned up it fitted what she had already imagined.
How much did the coincidence matter?
A great deal to the song’s afterlife. Nicks has described discovering that Rhiannon rode a horse, travelled with three singing birds and appeared during danger, after which people would black out and wake to find the threat gone and a song in the air.
Learning that there was already a song of Rhiannon in the tradition, having written one without knowing, is the kind of coincidence that builds a legend around a performer. It fed directly into the persona.
What did it do to Stevie Nicks?
It built her. The shawls, the black chiffon, the trailing sleeves and the whole mystical presentation came out of performing this song, and her audience has been dressing like it for fifty years.
She has also described the live performances as something close to possession, and the versions from the mid-seventies are noticeably more extreme than the record: longer, louder, and ending in something between a shout and an exorcism.
Why was the drum track so difficult?
Because Buckingham wanted something Mick Fleetwood does not naturally play. The idea was a syncopated, textured pattern, and Fleetwood’s instincts are rooted in blues and rock.
After two days of attempts, producer Keith Olsen solved it in the edit, splicing a usable loop together from two different takes. This was 1975, so that meant physically cutting tape with a razor blade and joining it. What sounds like a hypnotic groove is a repair job.
How successful was it?
Released as a single on 4 February 1976, it reached number eleven on the American pop chart, the band’s second top forty hit in the United States, and number four in Canada. A reissue charted in Britain in 1978.
The album it came from went to number one in America and stayed in the catalogue permanently. The song has been the fixed point of Nicks’ live show ever since, in Fleetwood Mac and on her own.
Why does it still work?
Because it describes a person entirely through what she does to other people. Rhiannon has no biography in the lyric. She arrives, she takes someone over, she cannot be held, and the narrator is left asking whether anyone has ever won her.
That vagueness is why the mythology slotted in so cleanly, and why listeners have read her as a lover, an addiction, a version of Nicks herself and a genuine spirit. The song accommodates all of it because it commits to none of it.
Why it lasted
Because a song about an ungovernable woman, written by a woman about to become famous, arriving on the record that turned Fleetwood Mac into the biggest band in America, is a piece of timing that cannot be manufactured.
Nicks wrote it before any of that happened, in ten minutes, from a name in a novel she found on a couch.
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