“Wouldn’t you love to love her?”
As quickly as you get to know Stevie Nicks as an artist is as quick as you understand her characters, so vivid and lifelike she sees them as entities, ones that have become known to the public as people. In 1975, she joined Fleetwood Mac, and just four songs into her debut with the band she wrote her signature song, one that has continued to bend the laws of time. Rhiannon, after all, is pretty much a timeless piece about a woman almost as iconic and singular as her creator.
Nicks has stated the inspiration came from a book she read at an airport, that the lyrics took
ten minutes to write. The song follows the story of a defiant, uncapturable woman; Nicks has taken to calling her ‘the Welsh witch’ at times. Nicks said in 1994: “Rhiannon is the Goddess of Steeds and the Maker of Birds, and her song is a song that takes away pain. When you hear her song, you close your eyes and fall asleep, and when you wake up the pain is gone or the danger is gone and you'll see her three birds flying away. That's the legend. So, whenever I sing the song, I always think of that.” The song was one of the world’s first introductions to Nicks singular style, her often mythical and mystic sense of how she writes is on full display here, though the song never claims it’s titular character to be that of a witch the environment created through Nicks words and the fantastic musical input of the rest of the band add a certain layer of otherworldly charm to an already fantastically crafted song. Nicks said as early as 1976 that the song was about a woman who was hard to tie down, and meant be uplifting towards those who listened, taking the public for a spin of what was to be expected of a female writer and her characters.
Nicks performing with Fleetwood Mac in 1975
The song is haunting, everything about it is near perfect in practice and idea, the winding music, the ambiguous lyrics, Nicks stellar delivery. Her ethereal and often haunting vocals do such wonders around her story, slow whispers at the end of Dreams unwind / Love’s a state of mind would feel sacrilegious coming from another. The performance in which the true status of Rhiannon becomes realized is the same that canonized Stevie Nicks as one of rock’s most important performers. Fleetwood Mac had already been through many lineup changes by the time the Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks were added to the mix. While most would be able to identify this as the most successful and important lineup of the band, they had to prove themselves to keep their roles. The 1975 music video is a completely new piece, a live rendition of the admittedly toned down album track. “We think she was, in fact, queen, and that the memory became the myth - I definitely feel like there’s a presence of her when we perform the song. This is the story of a Welsh Witch.” is how Nicks begins her performance in voice over, before walking to the microphone and singing the first lines of the song almost statuesque, her black chiffon draping as she delivers a powerhouse vocal, unmoving. About two minutes in her demeanor begins to change, her limbs feature a more dramatic flair as she repeats Will you ever win?, and during the instrumental break she paces the stage, twirling her dress as the music starts to build around her before she staggers back to the mic. She starts to sing the refrain Dreams unwind, Love’s a state of mind, suddenly the song amps up once more, and Nicks is howling into the microphone, almost possessed during the performance. The performance showcased another side of Nicks as a performer and storyteller, making her an impossible to replicate talent and securing her important position as the front-woman of Fleetwood Mac.
"She [Rhiannon] is some sort of reality. If I didn’t know she was a mystical character I would think she lived down the street." - Stevie Nicks to Rolling Stone magazine, 1979
Nicks speaks of the character Rhiannon as human often, like a friend she’s kept for all these years as opposed to just a character she had written. In 1989 she discussed how she was initially afraid to release the song as a single saying “I didn’t write Rhiannon as a single, because I thought ‘what if she doesn’t make it?’ ‘What if my Rhainnon falls flat on her face?’ [..] She’s a brilliant, brilliant character. I didn’t write Rhiannon for commericality. I wrote Rhiannon because I loved her name and I loved her story.” In a similar vein to Tom Petty’s American Girl of the following year, the songs stand apart in their own genres for how they tackle the muse of a woman in rock music. Rhiannon and the unnamed american girl are not lusted after by their narrators, they are not prizes to be won, nor are their stories centered around men. They are women who exist simply as women, fully fleshed out as people who stand on their own and harness their own stories, something near unheard of in a rock song. There’s no blame toward either, only understanding. To look at rock music in the late 1970s, women had become much more prominent within the sphere, but the songs with women as muses became much more vile. Something like Dirty Deeds was able to share a level of popularity with Rhiannon, American Girl struggled under the number one single Tonight’s the Night. In many ways, these two songs still stand apart from most written in their wake - how is it that most songs still paint women as desired objects and never simply as full fledged characters. Rhiannon is so special for so many reasons, especially how protective her creator is over her. Nicks would say in the same 1989 interview she discussed her fears of letting the song be a single, “I didn’t write her to be sold, she has simply never been for sale, and has never been.”
Rhiannon was something unheard of for her time. A song that in the eyes of her creator transcended art to a point she became human, protected so fiercely she remains less a song and more so a character whose story happens to live through radio waves. A woman who was not trapped by her surroundings, so completely in tune with herself she gave others the map as she waltzed on by.
Stevie Nicks and Fleetwood Mac peforming an iconic live rendition of Rhiannon in 1975:
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