Fleetwood Mac – Rhiannon

“Rhiannon” – Single by Fleetwood Mac from the album Fleetwood Mac
B-side: “Sugar Daddy”
Released: February 1976 (US), April 1976 (UK)
Recorded: February 1975
Label: Reprise
Songwriter: Stevie Nicks
Producers: Fleetwood Mac, Keith Olsen
Charted No.11 in US and No.46 in UK

The official music video remastered in HD for Fleetwood Mac – “Rhiannon” from the 1975 album “Fleetwood Mac”.

Stevie Nicks wrote this on a piano with help from her boyfriend, Lindsey Buckingham. At the time, they were recording as Buckingham-Nicks and about to release the track on their second album, but they joined Fleetwood Mac instead and recorded it with them.

Rhiannon is the name of a Welsh goddess. According to myth, Rhiannon, the goddess of fertility and the moon, shuns a god and marries a mortal man. That god then frames her for the murder of her own son, and she is forced to stand at the entrance to a city and tell everyone entering that she killed her child.

“Rhiannon” was voted no. 488 in The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time by Rolling Stone magazine. They also ranked the song number six on their list of the 50 greatest Fleetwood Mac songs.

Prior to the release of the band’s 1975 eponymous release, Fleetwood Mac played “Rhiannon” in El Paso, Texas, which was Nicks’ and Buckingham’s first live show as members of Fleetwood Mac.

When Nicks performed the song live, she often introduced it as “a song about an old Welsh witch.”During 1975–1982, Fleetwood Mac’s live performances of “Rhiannon” took on a theatrical intensity not present on the FM-radio single. The song built to a climax in which Nicks’s vocals were so impassioned that, as drummer and band co-founder Mick Fleetwood recalled, “her Rhiannon in those days was like an exorcism.”

The new Fleetwood Mac collection ’50 Years – Don’t Stop’ is available now: