It’s not at all unusual for songwriters to write songs and not know exactly what they mean. As an artist, you know that what you are creating is “right” even if you don’t understand its meaning. But when Fleetwood Mac produced the hugely popular Stevie Nicks song “Rhiannon,” they took this phenomenon to an interesting level.
The inspiration that came first was found in a novel that Nicks bought at an airport as he was about to board a plane. It was by Mary Leader, called Triad. In it, a woman named Branwen believes that she is possessed by another woman named Rhiannon. Nicks liked the name “Rhiannon” so much that she was motivated to write a song based on it. Nicks can be an extremely fast songwriter at times; as I mentioned in the past, “Dreams” took ten minutes to write. Well, this song was no different…she wrote it in ten minutes on a piano three months before she and Lindsey Buckingham joined Fleetwood Mac. In those days, when it was just Buckingham-Nicks, her songwriting method was pretty straightforward. . As Nicks told Mojo magazine in 2013, “I presented my songs to Lindsey on a cassette, which I kept by the coffee pot, with a note that said, ‘Here’s a new song, you can produce it but don’t change it.” ‘” The duo already had a failed album behind them, but they planned to use it for their second record. Joining Fleetwood Mac changed all that.
So now you have a smash hit on your hands and when you perform it, you wear flowing black outfits with shawls, armies of young girls in the audience sway to the music with you as you embody the magic and allure of a Celtic goddess. .
But do you know what your song means?
As it turns out, Rhiannon is also the name of a Welsh goddess who rode a white horse from the Mabinogion, a collection of eleven medieval stories steeped in pre-Christian Celtic mythology. In this myth, Rhiannon avoids a God to marry a mortal man. God takes revenge on her, falsely framing her for murdering her son. She is doomed to stand at the gate of the city and tell everyone who enters that she killed her own son.
Nicks found out about the myth afterwards but, in a happy coincidence, felt that the myth also reflected his own hit song. As a result, he began to research the Mabinogion stories to the point where he took on a life of his own. A Rhiannon “project” was born, though Nicks wasn’t sure if he was creating a movie, a cartoon, or a musical scenario. He wrote several songs for it, but only one made it onto another Fleetwood Mac album: “Angel” from the 1980 album “Tusk.”
Fortunately, it doesn’t matter that Nicks was unaware of the Welsh mythology that gave rise to the name of what became one of Fleetwood Mac’s biggest hits. Maybe one day we’ll get lucky and get to hear all the other songs on “Rhiannon,” but who knows if in a movie theater, a ballet or on your television.