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.

"[7] Nicks discovered the Rhiannon character in the early 1970s through a novel called Triad by the American author Mary Bartlet Leader.

[8][9] Unlike the other songs on Fleetwood Mac, which generally only required five attempts or fewer to achieve a satisfactory take, "Rhiannon" took longer to finalize.

After the band returned to the studio the following afternoon, Olsen took some two-inch recording tape and looped certain sections, although this resulted in "mini scars" in some of the cymbal crashes.

Nicks told the Los Angeles Times that a fan sent her "four paperback novels in a Manila envelope" five years after she first wrote "Rhiannon" in 1973 explored all the mythology behind the song.

Included in the envelope was Evangeline Walton's adaptation of the ancient British Mabinogion, which Nicks then bought the rights to after being "transfixed" by the prose.

[11] Nicks researched the Mabinogion story and began work on a Rhiannon project, unsure of whether it would become a movie, a musical, a cartoon, or a ballet.

However, the studio's computer-automated console crashed, and Kotera struggled to mix the song manually as both Lindsey Buckingham and Richard Dashut hovered over him throughout the session.

[12] Whereas Keith Olsen's album mix emphasized the instruments' bottom end, Caillat accentuated the midranges, bringing the bass guitar further up in the recording to compensate for the reduced lower frequencies.

While the song was included on Fleetwood Mac's 1987–1988 Shake the Cage Tour, the band occasionally omitted "Rhiannon" from the setlist when Nicks was suffering from problems with her throat.

Nicks' replacement, Bekka Bramlett, insisted on not playing it live, largely because she felt that her voice would be unsuitable for the song.

Before the band embarked on the tour, Christine McVie approved of Bramlett's decision, saying that it was "quite honorable to not sing those particular songs of Stevie's".