Rhiannon: The album Stevie Nicks always wanted to make
No matter how busy a life you lead, you would have to make an effort to rival the life of Stevie Nicks. The songwriter and vocalist had packed a lot into her life, from her tumultuous time recording with Fleetwood Mac, to her incredibly varied solo career and collaborations with other artists like Tom Petty, Nicks has had a colossal impact on the landscape of pop and rock music since first emerging during the 1970s. Despite such an extensive career and musical repertoire, the performer still has a few aspirations to achieve.
Chances are, when you think of Fleetwood Mac, you think of Stevie Nicks. Her voice soundtracked the most prolific and successful period of the band, producing classic tracks like ‘Dreams’ and ‘Landslide’, not to mention the colossal success of solo efforts like ‘Edge of Seventeen’. However, Nicks was not always placed at the heart of Fleetwood Mac. The group started out as a blues outfit founded by Peter Green in 196, but by the time Nicks joined the ranks eight years later, the group was virtually unrecognisable.
In fact, Nicks was never supposed to join Fleetwood Mac. The band attempted to recruit Lindsay Buckingham, with whom Nicks had recorded the collaborative album Buckingham Nicks in 1973, but Buckingham claimed that they came as a package deal, and so Nicks was ushered into the world of Fleetwood Mac. From that point on, her voice and songwriting became an intrinsic part of the band’s appeal, inspiring some of their most successful tracks of all time.
One such track was ‘Rhiannon’, which was written by Nicks and featured on Fleetwood Mac’s self-titled album in 1975. The songwriter was inspired to write the track after encountering the literary works of Mary Bartlet Leader. In Leader’s 1973 book, Triad: A novel of the Supernatural, the author details a witch called Rhiannon, likely inspired by the famous character from Welsh mythology.
After writing and releasing the song, Nicks became more and more aware of Welsh mythology and the character of Rhiannon. After becoming entranced by this goddess of horses, whose strong-minded, intelligent, and beautiful characteristics made her a natural fit for Nicks’ adoration, the songwriter continued to write songs about the figure. However, these tracks never saw the light of day during her time with Fleetwood Mac.
So, when the songwriter was asked back in 1981 whether she has any regrets, she promptly replied, “No, because the things that I’ve wanted to do that I haven’t done, I will do.” Explaining, “I want to do a children’s cartoon movie. And I want to do a ‘Rhiannon’ record with just the songs of Rhiannon – because there’s ‘Rhiannon’ but there’s also nine other songs I did right in that period of two years, when I was reading the books of Rhiannon.”
In subsequent decades, Nicks had repeatedly reaffirmed her desire to make her Rhiannon works into a larger project, whether it be an album, live production, film, or other form of entertainment. As recently as 2020, the songwriter claimed she was reworking Rhiannon, this time into a television miniseries utilising ten songs from the period in which she was writing about the character while in Fleetwood Mac.
Whether or not Nicks’ beloved Rhiannon project will ever see the light of day remains to be seen. It is worth noting, however, that this has been a passion project of Nickss for over four decades at this point, so there is no telling just how much writing and preparation has gone into the project so far.
