‘Rhiannon’ by Fleetwood Mac: the song that turned Stevie Nicks into a white witch

“Oh well, it was actually a stupid little paperback that I saw on a friend’s sofa,” Stevie Nicks, one of Fleetwood Mac’s two front women, told the magazine. Classic Rock. “I read it and I couldn’t get the name Rhiannon out of my head. So one day I sat down at the piano and wrote a song about a woman who is attracted to birds and magic.”

The novel that captivated Nicks was Triad: a Novel of the Supernatural by the American writer Mary Leader. In it she tells the story of a woman, Bronwen, who is possessed by the spirit of her deceased niece Rhiannon. The book flirts with mythology and presents an almost schizophrenic condition, with Rhiannon as the dark side of Bronwen. “She is like a cat in the dark”, sings Nicks in ‘Rhiannon’, “and then she is the darkness”.

When Nicks wrote the song in the fall of 1974, she was working as a waitress and living with her partner Lindsey Buckingham, with whom she recorded the album a year earlier. Buckingham Nicks had released, today a pop classic but at the time a commercial flop. When Mick Fleetwood, the drummer and driving force behind Fleetwood Mac, heard that record, he really wanted to include Buckingham in his band. The latter insisted that Stevie Nicks also come with him. The rest is history.

“I still have the cassette with the first attempts of ‘Rhiannon’,” Nicks once said. “Lindsey came into the room and I said, we need to go to the park immediately to record the sound of birds fluttering. He looked at me like I had gone crazy.” The instructions that Nicks gave the rest of Fleetwood Mac to capture the vibe of the song were equally magical: “It should sound like you see a seagull that rises up, spreads its wings and can fly into the air at any moment. That’s ‘Rhiannon’!”

Believe it or not, it wasn’t until much later that Nicks would discover that Rhiannon was also a divine queen from the Mabinogiin other words Pedair Cainc Y Mabinogi, the very earliest British prose, originally written in Wales, sometime between 1350 and 1410. Rhiannon was the goddess of the warhorse, the creator of birds, protege of horses. In times of adversity or war, she lulled the troubled souls to sleep with her song. When they woke up, the danger had passed. Nicks herself was surprised by the parallels with her song in which she sings about the healing power of her protagonist: “Woman taken by the wind / would you stay if she promised you heaven? / Will you ever win?”

‘Rhiannon’ saddled Nicks with an almost mythical aura: Fleetwood Mac fans were convinced that the singer was not averse to some witchcraft, white magic and perhaps even the occult. “But as far as I’m concerned, Rhiannon is definitely part of a reality,” says Nicks. “If I never knew she was connected to Welsh mythology I would have sworn she’s just a girl from down the street.”