FEATURE:
Groovelines
IN THIS PHOTO: Fleetwood Mac’s Stevie Nicks in a U.S. recording studio in 1975/PHOTO CREDIT: Fin Costello
Fleetwood Mac – Rhiannon
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I have not done this feature…
PHOTO CREDIT: Fin Costello/Getty Images
for quite a while and, with an absence of good news and too much happening in the music industry (compared to usual), I want to spend some time examining a classic track. I also realise that I have featured Fleetwood Mac a couple of times in the past couple of weeks – in the previous feature, I used them as an example of an older act who are doing well on streaming sites; perhaps (unintentionally) burying newer artists who need the streaming revenue. Because Fleetwood Mac released Rhiannon on 4th February, 1976, what better way to mark its forty-fifth anniversary than to look inside the song?! In fact, we refer to the song as ‘Rhiannon’, but I think that its full title is Rhiannon (Will You Ever Win). I wanted to write about the track, as I adore Stevie Nicks’ songwriting and, when she and her then-boyfriend Lindsey Buckingham first appeared on Fleetwood Mac’s eponymous album of 1975, I think her songwriting helped transformed the band. Rhiannon was released in February 1976 in the U.S., whilst it came out in the U.K. a couple of months later. Nicks discovered the Rhiannon character through a novel called Triad by Mary Bartlet Leader. The novel is about a woman named Branwen who is possessed by another woman named Rhiannon. Nicks wrote three of the eleven tracks on Fleetwood Mac – including the exceptional Landslide -, and I think she would hit her peak on 1977’s Rumours on songs like Dreams.
Rhiannon is rightfully considered one of Fleetwood Mac’s classics; it hit number-eleven in the U.S. in June 1976. I love the combination of beauty and haunting tones in Rhiannon and how tight the band sound. There would be tensions by the time of Rumours, yet they sound so solid and harmonious throughout Fleetwood Mac. Last year, there was news that Stevie Nicks was considering a film based around the Rhiannon song:
““Last year, I made a pitch to everybody that when this Fleetwood Mac tour is over, I’m taking next year off because I want to work on my Rhiannon book/movie,” she said, with the film said to be based on the classic Welsh myths that inspired the original song.
“And I want to maybe work with some different producers… I don’t know what I want to do! I just know that I don’t want a tour!”
“I have some Rhiannon poetry that I have written over the last 30 years that I’ve kept very quiet,” she explained.
“I’m thinking, ‘Well here I have all this time and I have a recording setup.’ And I’m thinking I’m going to start doing some recording. I’m going to start putting some of these really beautiful poems to music, and I have the ability to record them. So that’s on my to-do list”.
I want to bring in an article from Louder Sound, who told the story behind the bewitching and fascinating Rhiannon:
“It makes sense that what has become Stevie Nicks’s signature song was inspired by a kind of ancient magic. Bibliomancy, a mystical practice dating back to the 1700s, holds that if a book is picked up and opened to a page at random, the first word or sentence one sees will reveal some kind of epiphany. But the book that Nicks picked up in 1974 – one that would eventually help launch her into superstardom – didn’t exactly seem full of divine promise.
“It was just a stupid little paperback that I found somewhere at somebody’s house, lying on the couch,” Nicks says more than 40 years on. “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.
“I still have the cassette tape of when I was first writing it,” she continues. “Lindsey [Buckingham, Nicks’s musical and then romantic partner] came in and I said: ‘We have to go to a park and record the sound of birds rising.’ And he looked at me like I was crazy. And I said: ‘Don’t you think Rhiannon is a beautiful name?’ And he said: ‘Yeah, it is a beautiful name.’”
True to its witchy beginnings, in time the song would reveal deeper significance. “I come to find out, after I’ve written the song, that in fact Rhiannon was the goddess of steeds, maker of birds,” Nicks explains. “Her three birds sang music, and when something was happening in war you would see Rhiannon come riding in on a horse.
Joining the rest of Fleetwood Mac in Sound City Studios in Los Angeles, the pair were nervous and excited about their new roles with the band. Of the magic moment when they first harmonised with Christine McVie, Mick Fleetwood later said there was an “undeniable sensation of rightness” about the vocal sound. “It was if Merlin himself could not have concocted a spell more perfect.”
And the spell extended to Rhiannon. With Buckingham’s finger-picked guitar line, an offbeat snaky groove from Fleetwood and bassist John McVie, and ethereal background vocals, Nicks’s raw piano demo magically came to life.
“What the band does, and have always done,” she says, “is take the skeleton of a song and flesh it out. They arrange right underneath my little skeleton.”
In the years since, Rhiannon has been covered by everyone from Waylon Jennings to Taylor Swift to countless American Idol hopefuls. And it remains a staple in the reunited Mac’s shows in 2015. Along the way, the strange magic from that bit of bibliomancy has continued to surprise Nicks.
“Years later, somebody sent me a set of four books written by a lady named Evangeline Walton,” she says. “She spent her whole life translating The Mabinogion and the story of Rhiannon. She lived in Tuscon. I went there in 1977, after Rhiannon had been a big huge hit. Her house was totally Rhiannon. She spent her whole life on the story. She never married. She had in essence almost become Rhiannon. And it was trippy”.
On its forty-fifth anniversary tomorrow (4th February), I hope that Rhiannon is played a lot, as it is a magnificent song! I will be interested to see if Nicks peruses her mooted projects and anything comes to light this year. Although I love Fleetwood Mac as a whole, I have always had a soft spot for Stevie Nicks and her songwriting majesty. Whilst she has penned many classics for Fleetwood Mac, I think that Rhiannon is among…
HER very best moments.