Rhiannon

Stevie Nicks named the song before she knew the name was already old.

She found Rhiannon in a novel and built a woman out of the name — someone who flies through the night, who can’t be captured, who leaves destruction and longing behind her. Only later did she learn the name belonged to a Celtic goddess of horses and birds and the moon. She had written about a Welsh goddess without knowing the goddess was there.

By the time she found that out, the song had stopped being something she made. It had started being something that happened to her.

The studio recording on Fleetwood Mac in 1975 is restrained. Lindsey Buckingham’s production keeps it tight, commercial, ready for radio. That is one version of the song, and it is a small one.

Onstage it became the other thing. Nicks would spin and twirl for ten minutes or more, her voice dropping into registers that didn’t seem human, the band following her into spaces they couldn’t have rehearsed. The pretty radio cut was the door. What happened in front of an audience was the room behind it.

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

That line is poetry. Nicks doesn’t sing it like poetry. She sings it like testimony, like she has seen Rhiannon herself and is trying to warn you.

I’ve watched dozens of live performances of this song. The best ones are frightening. She doesn’t perform Rhiannon. She channels her, and you can hear the difference. Performance is an act. Channeling is surrender. One of those things you can fake and the other you can’t, and on the nights this song worked, she wasn’t faking.

Some songs belong to their singers. This one took its singer instead.

She named it before she knew the name. The name came back for her anyway, and she never got loose of it. Maybe she never tried.