[David]

A lot of people think that Mistaken Love is from that cycle.

In addition to Forest of the Black Roses, there’s one called The Maker of Birds (copyrighted with that title in 1978). Some people think Blue Water, Stay Away, Kind of Woman, and Sorcerer were originally part of that cycle. And is Sisters of the Moon really a Rhiannon song? Why, just because it’s dark and mystical? So is Planets of the Universe.

I’ve heard people say that even Angel was originally part of the song cycle, but I never bought it—the only connection to Rhiannon is a tenuous one: in a 1979 radio interview with Jim Ladd, Stevie says that one of the lines refers tangentially to the story (“so I close my eyes softly till I become that part of the wind that we all long for sometime”).

Stevie said in 1989 that she had 11 Rhiannon songs fully recorded. Problem is that she has never really explained what makes or doesn’t make a Rhiannon song: the theme? the date of writing? the original intent to use as part of a movie project? A lot of these songs have not much in common thematically or even musically. I guess you could argue that something like Kind of Woman, which is pretty oblique in its images and general in its recollection of unrequited love, could apply as much to Rhiannon as to Lindsey–Stevie. But Stevie hasn’t ever given us a clear idea of what it means to be a Rhiannon song.