The annals of popular music are scattered with examples of songs that have been allegedly written in minutes and gone on to resonate with audiences across the globe for decades and generations to come.
What’d I Say was reportedly written by Ray Charles at a 1958 gig in Brownsville, Pennsylvania, when he found himself 12 minutes short of material and with an expectant audience waiting to dance.
Yesterday was famously penned by Paul McCartney after it came into his head fully formed in a dream, with the Beatle then fleshing out chords with some initial makeshift lyrics about scrambled eggs in the moments after he woke.
REM’s Losing My Religion reportedly came into being within minutes after guitarist Peter Buck was trying to learn mandolin one day and happened to have the tape machine running.
And then there is Rhiannon, the song reportedly written by Stevie Nicks in ten minutes in 1974 after a chance encounter with a paperback fantasy novel, which was lying discarded on the sofa at a friend’s house.
“It was just a stupid little paperback that I found somewhere at somebody’s house, lying on the couch,” Nicks told Bill DeMain of Classic Rock in 2023. “It was called Triad [written by Mary Leader] and it was all about this girl who becomes possessed by a spirit named Rhiannon.
“I read the book, but I was so taken with that name that I thought, ‘I’ve got to write something about this’. So I sat down at the piano and started this song about a woman that was all involved with these birds and magic.”
In 1975, Rhiannon would become a cornerstone of the self-titled album by the newly reimagined band Fleetwood Mac.
The song reached No.11 in the US when released as a single the following year, but it was in the live arena where its significance really began to play out.
As Fleetwood Mac rose in stature so the song played a fundamental part in their live set, with Nicks honing her striking whirling dance, arms outstretched, hair tumbling out from under a top hat and an array of draped, fluttering scarves.
As drummer Mick Fleetwood once put it, Nicks’ performance of the song on stage every night “was like an exorcism”.
Rhiannon showcased the powerful and ethereal persona of Nicks and helped pave the way for the band’s folklore-infused sound and subsequent superstardom.
50 years on from its release, it stands as one of their most iconic and career-defining tracks.
Stevie Nicks and her partner Lyndsey Buckingham were living in an apartment in Marina del Rey, Los Angeles, when Nicks penned the song.
The pair had met during Nicks’ senior year at Menlo-Atherton High School in Atherton, a suburb 30 miles south of San Francisco.
Buckingham was in a psychedelic rock band called Fritz, and in mid-1967 he asked Nicks to become the band’s lead singer. Fritz later opened for Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin between 1968 and 1970, and Nicks has credited both artists for inspiring her onstage intensity.
In 1972, Nicks and Buckingham were writing as a duo, with Nicks waiting tables and working as a cleaner by day to support them both while at night they recorded demos.
They landed a deal with Polydor and released their debut album – titled simply Buckingham Nicks – but the album sold poorly and they were dropped by the label.
By then they had moved to Los Angeles and Nicks once more worked a variety of jobs to support them, including cleaning the house of Keith Olsen, who had produced their debut album.
In late 1974 Olsen was working at Sound City Studios in Van Nuys, Los Angeles, when Mick Fleetwood paid a visit. Fleetwood was in search of a recording facility for Fleetwood Mac and during his visit Olsen played him the track Frozen Love by Buckingham Nicks.
Fleetwood was impressed by Buckingham’s guitar work, and when guitarist Bob Welch left Fleetwood Mac, Fleetwood got in touch with Buckingham.
On 31 December 1974 Fleetwood asked Buckingham to join Fleetwood Mac but Buckingham refused, insisting that he and Stevie Nicks were a “package deal” and that he would not join without her.
Much has been written about the events that followed but, in essence, Mick Fleetwood and bassist John McVie agreed that vocalist, keyboardist and songwriter Christine McVie would make the final decision on whether Nicks should join Fleetwood Mac due to her initial apprehension about having another woman in the band.
A meeting was set up between Nicks, Buckingham and Fleetwood Mac on New Year’s Eve 1974 at the El Carmen Mexican restaurant at 8138 W 3rd St in Los Angeles. Nicks was the first to arrive, still wearing a flapper dress from her shift working in a restaurant.
The chemistry was immediate. “We met and I instantly liked her,” McVie told Rolling Stone in 2014. “She and I are not competitive in any way at all. We're totally different but totally sympathetic with each other.”
In January 1975, the new re-energised line-up of Fleetwood Mac arrived at Sound City Studios to begin recording their second self-titled album (also known as the White Album), the first eponymous album having been released in 1968 with the Peter Green-helmed blues incarnation of the band.
For Nicks and Buckingham there was a mix of excitement and nervousness about joining Fleetwood Mac at the dawn of 1975.
For Mick Fleetwood the sonic transformation was profound, as cited by Bill DeMain of Classic Rock in 2013. Speaking of the moment when Stevie Nicks, Lyndsey Buckingham and Christine McVie first harmonised in the studio, Fleetwood reportedly said there was “an undeniable sense of rightness” about the vocal sound. “It was as if Merlin himself could not have concocted a spell more perfect.”
When Stevie Nicks had penned Rhiannon back in 1974, she said she was so taken with the novel that she “had to write something”. She composed the song on piano and recorded it onto a cassette tape.
The Welsh legend of Rhiannon is mentioned in the novel, and Nicks would often introduce the song live as “a song about an old Welsh witch”.
Lyrically, it’s mystical and ethereal – “She is like a cat in the dark/And then she is the darkness/She rules her life like a fine skylark/And when the sky is starless”.
It’s a beautifully crafted song and for all its rich, ethereal qualities, it is punchy and direct.
A hypnotic guitar riff over an Am-F chord sequence intros the 129 bpm track, which nestles within a propulsive rock groove and is accented by Mick Fleetwood’s staggered toms.
30 seconds in and the whole thing lifts up to C-F. “All your life you’ve never seen a woman taken by the wind,” sings Nicks in a husky, sonorous and soulful timbre.
One distinctive element of the song is Christine McVie’s Fender Rhodes keyboard, which McVie used on the song up to the late ’70s.
“The Rhodes was great to play on something like Rhiannon,” McVie told Contemporary Keyboard magazine in October 1980, “because it's so bell-like, but on anything else it would kind of get lost among the electric guitars.”
Most of the songs on the Fleetwood Mac album took no more than five attempts to get the best take, but Rhiannon took far longer.
“It was one of those songs that took over a day to get the basic track, and we're on analogue tape,” said Keith Olsen in Zoe Howe’s 2014 book Stevie Nicks: Visions, Dreams And Rumours. “The first pass was kind of magical but had too many mistakes. The second pass was pretty good, but didn't have the magic, and from there it went downhill. But I kept those two.”
The following afternoon, the band returned to the studio, at which point Olsen reportedly took some two-inch recording tape and looped certain sections, although this resulted in "mini scars" on some of the cymbal crashes.
Olsen reportedly then spliced together the best parts from the previous session to create the final version that appeared on the album. Olsen concluded that around 14 or 15 cuts were required to piece the entire song together.
While Rhiannon was never scheduled for a single release, it gained significant radio play leading to a demand from listeners. So on 19 January 1976, one year after the album was released, the single version of the song was mixed in studio one at Wally Heider Studios.
Ken Caillat, who had mixed a live version of the song two days earlier, was called upon to mix the single.
While Olsen’s mix of the track for the album emphasised the bottom end frequencies, on this single mix Caillat accentuated the midranges, increasing the level of the bass to compensate for the reduced lower frequencies. The mix took seven hours to complete before being transferred onto an Ampex stereo two-track recorder.
Rhiannon was released as a single in February 1976 and promptly reached No.11 in the Billboard Hot 100.
![Fleetwood Mac - Rhiannon (Official Music Video) [HD] - YouTube](https://img.youtube.com/vi/jQAK6sVovUk/maxresdefault.jpg)
Soon after the release of Rhiannon as a single, Nicks spoke of its impact: “People come up to me every place we play and tell me what an effect Rhiannon has had on their lives – as if it has some spiritual power over them.”
In a quote from the same year, Nicks spoke of the live power and emotional intensity of performing the song live.
“Rhiannon is a heavy-duty song to sing every night,” Nicks said. “On stage it’s really a mind tripper. Everybody, including me, is just blitzed by the end of it. And I put out so much in that song that I’m nearly down.
“There’s something to that song that touches people. I don’t know what it is but I’m really glad it happened.”
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