Rhiannon

She found the name in a novel. Rhiannon. A Welsh witch from some paperback she was reading. She wrote the song in ten minutes, not knowing the real mythology—the goddess, the birds, the otherworld. She just liked how it sounded.

The universe has a sense of humor like that.

This was before Rumours. Before the drama, the cocaine, the soap opera that would define them. Just a band figuring out what they sounded like with two new members from some failed folk duo nobody had heard of.

Lindsey Buckingham’s guitar on this track is doing something sneaky. Listen to it—it’s not leading, it’s weaving. Wrapping around Stevie’s voice like smoke, like something you can’t quite grab. He was already in love with her. You can hear it in how carefully he plays.

“She is like a cat in the dark, and then she is the darkness.”

Live, Stevie would transform. The shawls, the spinning, the way she’d crouch and howl the final verses like something had possessed her. It wasn’t an act. Or maybe it was, but she believed it so completely that the difference stopped mattering.

The studio version is restrained. Pretty. Almost polite.

The live versions from ‘76 and ‘77 are exorcisms. Eight, nine, ten minutes of Stevie unraveling, the band following her into whatever space she’d found, Lindsey’s guitar getting more desperate as she slipped further away.

She said later she almost destroyed her voice doing this song. Night after night, becoming Rhiannon, not knowing how to stop.

Some songs you write.

Some songs write you.