Rhiannon
Stevie Nicks wrote it in ten minutes, off a name from a paperback. She nearly destroyed her voice trying to stop singing it.
The “Rhiannon” on the record is the smallest “Rhiannon” there is. I mean that as an argument, not an insult — the studio track is a good song. But a good song is not what this thing became at night, on stage, when Stevie Nicks couldn’t find her way back out of it.
Start with how it was written, because everything strange about the song’s life starts there. Stevie Nicks wrote it in ten minutes. She got the name from a paperback novel she was reading — a Welsh witch called Rhiannon. She didn’t know the real mythology underneath the name: the goddess, the birds, the otherworld. None of that was in front of her when she wrote it. She just liked how the name sounded. Ten minutes. Hold onto that number.
This was before Rumours. Before the cocaine, the breakups, the soap opera the band would become famous for surviving. Fleetwood Mac in this moment was just a band figuring out what it sounded like, having taken on two new members from a failed folk duo nobody had heard of. One of them wrote this song.
Listen to what Lindsey Buckingham does on the guitar. He isn’t leading. He’s weaving — moving around Stevie’s voice instead of in front of it, holding the shape of the song without ever grabbing at it. He was already in love with her by then, and I think you can hear it in how carefully he plays. I can’t prove that. It’s just what the playing sounds like.
“She is like a cat in the dark, and then she is the darkness.”
The studio version is restrained. Pretty, even. Almost polite. If it were the only version that existed, “Rhiannon” would be a good song about a name from a paperback, four minutes long, and that would be the end of it.
The live versions from ‘76 and ‘77 are something else. Eight minutes. Nine. Ten. The shawls, the spinning, the way she would crouch down and howl the final verses like something had hold of her. The band followed her into whatever space she’d found, and Buckingham’s guitar got more desperate the further she went.
Was it an act? Maybe it started as one. But she believed it so completely that the difference stopped mattering — and I’m not sure that’s a difference the body respects anyway. She said later she almost destroyed her voice doing this song. Night after night, becoming Rhiannon, not knowing how to stop.
That sentence deserves to be read plainly, without decoration. A singer nearly wrecked the one instrument she had, on one song, because she could not find the way out of a character she had invented in ten minutes.
Here is the part I keep coming back to. She didn’t study the goddess and the birds and the otherworld and then build a song sturdy enough to carry all of that. She didn’t know any of it. The weight arrived later, on its own, and it turned out the song could hold it — could hold more than she had put in, more than she had agreed to give. The ten minutes weren’t the work. The ten minutes were a door opening. The work, and the cost, came every night after, on a stage, in front of people, when the song asked for everything and she kept answering.
Most songs stay the size you write them. This one didn’t. It grew underneath her — from a pretty four-minute track on a record by a band still finding itself, into ten minutes of a woman unraveling in front of an audience while the man who loved her tried to follow on guitar.
She wrote it in ten minutes, not knowing what the name meant.
Then she sang it night after night, not knowing how to stop.
