Rhannion
![](/file/13a3b9e931c19ca98e655.gif)
🔞 ALL INFORMATION CLICK HERE 👈🏻👈🏻👈🏻
Rhannion
All Titles TV Episodes Celebs Companies Keywords Advanced Search
Fully supported English (United States) Partially supported Français (Canada) Français (France) Deutsch (Deutschland) हिंदी (भारत) Italiano (Italia) Português (Brasil) Español (España) Español (México)
Up
5,198,881
this week
Rhannion is an actress.
See full bio »
Biography
Awards
Photo Gallery
Filmography (by Job)
Trailers and Videos
Filmography
by Year
by Job
by Ratings
by Votes
by Genre
by Keyword
Personal Details
Biography
Other Works
Publicity Listings
Official Sites
Contact Info (IMDbPro)
Did You Know?
Personal Quotes
Trivia
Trademark
Photo & Video
Photo Gallery
Trailers and Videos
Opinion
Awards
Related Items
Credited With
News
External Sites
Professional Services
Get more at IMDbPro
How Much Have You Seen?
How much of Rhannion's work have you seen?
Show all
Hide all
|
Show by...
Job
Year »
Rating »
Number of Ratings »
Genre »
Keyword »
|
Edit
All Titles TV Episodes Celebs Companies Keywords Advanced Search
Fully supported English (United States) Partially supported Français (Canada) Français (France) Deutsch (Deutschland) हिंदी (भारत) Italiano (Italia) Português (Brasil) Español (España) Español (México)
Filmography
by Year
by Job
by Ratings
by Votes
by Genre
by Keyword
Did You Know?
Personal Quotes
Trivia
Trademark
Photo & Video
Photo Gallery
Trailers and Videos
Opinion
Awards
Related Items
Credited With
News
External Sites
Professional Services
Get more at IMDbPro
Other Works
|
Publicity Listings
|
Official Sites
How to Format Lyrics: Type out all lyrics, even if it’s a chorus that’s repeated throughout the song The Section Header button breaks up song sections. Highlight the text then click the link Use Bold and Italics only to distinguish between different singers in the same verse. E.g. “Verse 1: Kanye West, Jay-Z , Both ” Capitalize each line To move an annotation to different lyrics in the song, use the [...] menu to switch to referent editing mode
What have the artists said about the song?
What has the media said about the song?
Sound City Studios, Van Nuys, California
Genius is the ultimate source of music knowledge, created by scholars like you who share facts and insight about the songs and artists they love.
Fleetwood Mac’s singer Stevie Nicks' signature song, one of the many classic hits produced by the group in the mid ‘70s, constantly voted as one of the top all time 500. Based on the story of a legendary old Welsh witch, Goddess – Rhiannon .
Part of the group’s second best selling album, aptly named Fleetwood Mac .
I wrote this song and made [Rhiannon] into what I thought was an old Welsh witch. It’s just about a very mystical woman that finds it very, very hard to be tied down in any kind of way.
She also told The Guardian about comments that claimed she was a witch:
‘Rhiannon’ was the only song I ever wrote about a sort of celestial being, but that song and the fact I wore black, floaty clothes somehow became this witch thing. About three years into it, it actually started to scare me. People were writing me really weird letters that were scaring me. So I had [my stylist] make me up a bunch of outfits that were just horrible – I call them the Easter Egg outfits because they were peach, mint green and blue, not colors for me. And I wore them and so did my girl singers. I thought: ‘I’m going to put the top on the box of this one.’ After a while I said: ‘Screw that, I’m going back to black!’ And if they think I’m a witch I don’t care, because I’m not a witch.
Although Nicks took the name Rhiannon from an unrelated novel, the lyrics of the song accidentally resemble a goddess from a Welsh story collection. After learning about this, Nicks began incorporating the Welsh myth into the song’s aesthetics. Live performances were often faster, darker and more powerful than the studio version. Eventually, Nicks seemed to be embodying the goddess herself.
Rolling Stone named it the #2 greatest Fleetwood Mac song, saying:
Shortly before she and Buckingham joined Fleetwood Mac, Nicks picked up a novel called Triad at an airport. The book told the story of a Welsh woman who believes she’s been possessed by another woman, named Rhiannon. ‘I wrote this song and made her into what I thought was an old Welsh witch,’ Nicks said . ‘It’s just about a very mystical woman that finds it very, very hard to be tied down in any kind of way.’ Envisioning a ‘Welsh country song,’ Nicks began with stark, autumnal piano chords, around which Buckingham built a guitar part. ‘My tendency is to want to add rhythm and to rock it up,’ he recalled. Nicks later learned that Rhiannon was a character from Welsh mythology, but the real myth she invented on Fleetwood Mac’s first American Top 10 hit was her own – the shawl-wearing California enchantress who left crowds stunned by her smoldering, trancelike performances. ‘She’s like your fairy-princess godmother,’ Courtney Love once said, ‘who lives in a magical kingdom somewhere and has, like, fabulous romances.’
Jason Newsted: "The way that I played and lived my life finally took its toll"
Jeff Beck and Johnny Depp confirm their collaboration album
"And then things got weird..." Johnny Depp on how music saved his life
Contact me with news and offers from other Future brands
Receive email from us on behalf of our trusted partners or sponsors
Subscribe to the world's greatest music magazines
More stories to check out before you go
Louder is supported by its audience. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s why you can trust us
By
Bill DeMain
( Classic Rock
)
published September 04, 2015
How a chance encounter with a fantasy novel inspired Stevie Nicks' witchy hit and resurrected Fleetwood Mac
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.
This is all in the Welsh translation of The Mabinogion, their book of mythology. When she came you’d kind of black out, then wake up and the danger would be gone, and you’d see the three birds flying off and you’d hear this little song. So there was, in fact, a song of Rhiannon. I had no idea about any of this.”
Nicks’s concerns in the autumn of 1974 were more down-to-earth. Working as a waitress, she was living with Buckingham, writing for the follow-up to the pair’s mostly ignored debut album, Buckingham-Nicks, and struggling to stay upbeat about her future. Meanwhile, their producer, Keith Olsen, met Fleetwood Mac drummer Mick Fleetwood, who was looking for a replacement for the band’s guitarist, Bob Welch. Olsen played Fleetwood a few Buckingham-Nicks tracks. Fleetwood was impressed. Although he initially wanted Buckingham, and Olsen as a producer, Lindsey insisted it had to be a package deal that included Stevie.
“Who knows?” she says today. “It’s possible if that hadn’t happened that I would’ve gone back to school and never had a music career.”
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.”
The self-titled album (also known as the White Album) that launched the most successful and enduring version of Fleetwood Mac was released in July 1975. Chosen as the second single, Rhiannon went to No.11 in the US but failed to catch on in the UK (when it was re-released two years later it reached No.46).
But the song’s significance went far beyond chart positions. It quickly became a live showcase for Nicks and a cornerstone of the band’s image and mythology. On stage, whirling with chiffon scarves, blonde hair tumbling out from beneath a top hat, Nicks would push the song to six minutes, building to a frenzy on the outro (_‘Dreams unwind/Love’s a state of mind_ ’ ) that Fleetwood said “was like an exorcism”.
“ Rhiannon is a heavy-duty song to sing every night,” Nicks said in 1976. “On stage it’s really a mind tripper. Everybody, including me, is just blitzed by the end of it. And I put out so much in that song that I’m nearly down. There’s something to that song that touches people. I don’t know what it is but I’m really glad it happened.”
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.
“She had heard about the song. She told me about her life and how she had been entranced by the name, just like I had. It’s so interesting, because her last book was in 1974, and that’s right when I wrote Rhiannon . So it’s like her work ended and my work began.”
Bill DeMain is a correspondent for BBC Glasgow, a regular contributor to MOJO, Classic Rock and Mental Floss , and the author of six books, including the best-selling Sgt. Pepper At 50 . He is also an acclaimed musician and songwriter who's written for artists including Marshall Crenshaw, Teddy Thompson and Kim Richey. His songs have appeared in TV shows such as Private Practice and Sons of Anarchy . In 2013, he started Walkin' Nashville, a music history tour that's been the #1 rated activity on Trip Advisor. An avid bird-watcher, he also makes bird cards and prints.
Sign up below to get the latest from Classic Rock, plus exclusive special offers, direct to your inbox!
Thank you for signing up to Classic Rock. You will receive a verification email shortly.
There was a problem. Please refresh the page and try again.
Louder is part of Future plc, an international media group and leading digital publisher. Visit our corporate site (opens in new tab) .
©
Future Publishing Limited Quay House, The Ambury,
Bath
BA1 1UA. All rights reserved. England and Wales company registration number 2008885.
Alexa Tomas Public
Veronica Stone Porn
Kade Porn