1975 · Behind the Songs
Stevie Nicks conjures a goddess and never looks back.
The recording in context
“Rhiannon” was Stevie Nicks’s calling card — the song that introduced her swirling, shawl-draped mystique to the world. Written before she joined Fleetwood Mac and recorded for the band’s 1975 self-titled breakthrough, it was inspired by a character in Mary Leader’s novel Triad, whom Nicks took for a Welsh witch (she later learned Rhiannon is a figure from the Mabinogion, the ancient Welsh myths — even better). Released as a single in early 1976, it became one of the band’s signature songs and Nicks’s onstage possession-piece for decades.
Listen closely
The record builds like a spell being cast. Listen to how it starts in near-whisper — Nicks’s voice low and grainy over a restrained groove — and then gathers force, the band tightening around her like a gathering storm. The famous live versions stretched this arc into theatre, but the studio take has its own quiet power: the tension between control and abandon is the whole song.
Notice Buckingham’s guitar work underneath — economic, almost subliminal, leaving all the air in the room for Nicks. And that ending, where her voice climbs and the band surges: it doesn’t resolve so much as vanish, like something that was never entirely there.
“Rhiannon” didn’t just launch Stevie Nicks — it invented her, and she’s been living inside the invention, gloriously, ever since.