‘Rhiannon’: The Fleetwood Mac song that still knocks out Stevie Nicks
It’s hard to imagine Stevie Nicks being offered to Fleetwood Mac as a sort of two-for-one package. When Mick Fleetwood approached her partner, Lindsey Buckingham, and offered him the role of the band’s lead guitarist and vocalist, he responded with a condition that would alter the course of music history. He would accept only if he could bring Nicks into the fold with him.
It was a relatively unpalatable proposition for Fleetwood at the time. Nicks was somewhat of an unknown entity to him, and they already had another vocalist to sing alongside Buckingham, in Christine McVie. It’s also worth noting that Fleetwood’s decision came in a time of rife misogyny, not just in the arts but in society, and the simple fact was that the band viewed McVie as their one and only female vocalist.
But such was Buckingham’s persuasive powers that Fleetwood relented, not knowing that he had just recruited one of the most impactful songwriters of the late 1970s. As they embarked on the first album as a new look five-piece, as if eager to prove herself, the two standout tracks would come from the hallways of Nicks’ mind.
‘Landslide’ and ‘Rhiannon’ were presented to the group swiftly upon her arrival, and any fears of her competency as a creative force within the band were soon squashed. The former track had been a previously released Buckingham-Nicks track and hinted towards the introspective depth within Nicks’ writing style, while the latter brazenly revealed her penchant for the cosmic and acute ability to package it in a universally appealing melody.
‘Rhiannon’ is the namesake for the goddess of the moon, rebirth, and fertility; a goddess whose power has been coined the “divine feminine”, earning her the moniker ‘Night Queen’. All lyrics and references that can be found in this track, and on paper, feel as though they verge on the esoteric. But Nicks’ husky vocals and a soothing melodic composition make for a song bursting with charm, allure and romanticism.
But it was never performative for Nicks. Perhaps the reason behind this not only being her first song for the band but also her first hit for them was that it was an honest portrayal of her outlook and style. In fact, she didn’t need the adulation and curiosity of fans who then heralded her as the queen of the cosmos; instead, it was purely for herself.
In a 1977 interview, she said, “The song is indeed so special that even without an audience it knocks me out to such a point that, even when there is nobody out there watching, even when we are just rehearsing it, which we don’t do very often, but when we do run through it, it’s always romantic.”
While the fellow band members may not have subscribed to her celestial teachings, they would have certainly known they were on to something special during the first run through of ‘Rhiannon’. It may not have been packed with romance of the familiar kind, but there’s no mistaking the artistic companionship that existed within the chorus harmonies, an arrangement that sparked the creative love affair of an oncoming classic album just two years later.
