Rhiannon

Most songs on Fleetwood Mac's 1975 album needed five takes or fewer. "Rhiannon" took more than a day just to get a basic track, on analog tape. Producer Keith Olsen said the first pass was magical but had too many mistakes, the second was pretty good but lacked the magic, and from there it went downhill, so he kept those two. When the band returned the next afternoon, he looped sections of two-inch tape, leaving "mini scars" in some cymbal crashes, and spliced the best parts together with around 14 or 15 cuts. Some of Stevie Nicks's vocals ran through a Lexicon Delta T Delay.

Nicks wrote the song after reading the novel Triad by Mary Bartlet Leader, which mentions the Welsh legend of Rhiannon. She was taken with the character and felt she had to write something. She composed it on piano and recorded a demo on cassette. Only in early 1978 did she learn that Rhiannon came from a Welsh goddess.

The single version was mixed on January 19, 1976, at Wally Heider Studios, after the computer-automated console crashed on engineer Kelly Kotera and Ken Caillat took over for seven hours. It peaked at no. 11 in the US in June 1976. Onstage Nicks often introduced it as a song about an old Welsh witch, and Mick Fleetwood said her version in those days was like an exorcism.