By Savannah Brown
If I had even less of a life than I do now, I would sit down and write a comprehensive history of Fleetwood Mac, complete with hundreds of essays featuring my own takes, ponderances, and obsessions over this 70s Leviathan. I would spend years writing about how a band with three lead singers was able to conquer the charts, with some of the most beautiful music, influential band members, and craziest stories the industry had ever seen. Fleetwood Mac is not only one of my favorite bands musically, but one of the bands that I find to be the most fascinating in every way, and I mean this beyond just the messy, dramatic, cocaine-fueled fighting that they’re so infamous for.
Even still, that’s what I’m focusing on right now because I’ll be darned if this low-hanging fruit isn’t the juiciest.
“Silver Springs” was released as a B-Side to the “Rumours” album single “Go Your Own Way” in 1977. In the opinion of myself and many others, it is one of the most gorgeous songs in the Fleetwood Mac discography. The song, written and sung by Stevie Nicks in 1977, is about her tumultuous breakup with band guitarist Lindsey Buckingham. The band members writing songs about their break-ups with each other and then featuring the respective ex on the track is nothing crazy for them, and to many, is one of their defining aspects. However, “Silver Springs” has always felt in a different class than their other songs with similar subject matter.
Nicks and Buckingham began dating in 1973 after parting ways with the band they had been part of in college. In 1974, they joined Fleetwood Mac as a couple and released the band’s second eponymous album, “Fleetwood Mac.” Originally, the band only wanted to hire Buckingham for vocals and guitar, but he notably refused to join unless Nicks could come along with him.
In 1976, just before “Rumours” was set to begin recording, Nicks called off the romantic relationship (also around the time that two other Fleetwood Mac members, John and Christine McVie, divorced). Christine McVie said of the break-up in, “Fleetwood Mac, the First 30 Years” that, “Lindsey was pretty down about it for a while, then he just woke up one morning and said, ‘Fuck this, I don’t want to be unhappy,’ and started getting some girlfriends together. Then Stevie couldn’t handle it …”
As a coping mechanism for the break-up, the pair(s) did what any normal couple does when trying to get over one another: write venomous and scathing music about the relationship, and sing it to each other in front of millions of people!
Of the Buckingham/Nicks diss-tracks recorded for “Rumours,” none are as gut-punching as Silver Springs. Stevie Nicks was incredibly irritated with the Buckingham-written “Go Your Own Way” line “Packing up/shacking up is all you wanna do.” Nicks said to Rolling Stone in 1997, “I very much resented him for [singing those lyrics]...he knew it wasn’t true…every time those words would come out onstage I wanted to go over and kill him.” She wanted to write a song that stung just as hard. “Silver Springs” was not just for the world to hear, it was deeper. It was for him. “I’m so angry with you. You will listen to me on the radio for the rest of your life, and it will bug you. I hope it bugs you.” She said of “Silver Springs” in a 1997 radio interview.
“Silver Springs” features beautiful lyrical imagery and scathing promises to Nicks’ former lover. She wrote it as a testament to what could have been between them, deciding on the title when she drove through Silver Springs, Maryland, and realized that their relationship could have been as “fabulous” as the place sounded. The studio version also shows off the extent of Nicks’ range. For most of the song, she’s at the peak of her smooth and angelic voice. However, as the song climaxes, Nicks belts at her angriest in the Mac discography, showing off the gruffness of her voice that would be utilized in her seemingly destined career as a solo 80s rocker. Aside from Nicks’ pipes, Ken Caillat, a co-producer on “Rumours,” told Rolling Stone in 2017 that he “… views it as one of the best-engineered and best-produced tracks from the sessions, emphasizing the combination of acoustic and electric guitars added by the song’s own subject, Buckingham.”
However, the song wasn’t just for Buckingham either. In fact, Nicks gave her mother, Barbara Nicks, the rights to that song so she could collect the royalties on it forever.
It is such a beautiful song with a rich background that had nothing short of the purest intentions for release. Why then, was it only a B-Side to the single that scorned her the most, condemning this amazing song to be, at least for a while, one of the lesser-known Mac Tracks?
Without going too into my own personal opinion on what exactly happened, the biggest factor behind Silver Springs being excluded from release on the biggest album of the year —and of the band’s entire discography — is timing.
The story goes that Mick Fleetwood (drummer and co-founder of Fleetwood Mac) and Buckingham (who just happened to have a hand in the album’s production) pulled Nicks aside during a recording session for the album one day, and told her they needed to discuss something in the parking lot.
They told her that Silver Springs had too long of a runtime (4:47) and she already had too many solo ballads, so it had been cut from the album, in favor of the song “I Don’t Want to Know” (which they had already begun recording without Nicks’ knowledge). The latter is a Nicks’ penned duet about the relationship, that the ex-couple recorded for the one album they released pre-Mac (which Buckingham coincidentally had cut before the album’s release).
On that day in the Sausalito parking lot, “I started to scream bloody murder and probably said every horribly mean thing that you could possibly say to another human being and walked back in the studio completely flipped out,” Nicks told People in 2023.
The producers gave her the options of either trimming the length of Silver Springs, replacing Gold Dust Woman, or “take a hike.” So, as Nicks put it, “‘...basically, with a gun to my head, I went out and sang ‘I Don’t Want To Know’.”
Silver Springs was thrown on the back of “Go Your Own Way” and forgotten about for 15 years. But then, in 1991, it turned out to be responsible for Nicks’ official departure from Fleetwood Mac. She included it while compiling her (amazing) greatest hits album “Timespace” when she found out that Mick Fleetwood was including it in their “25 Years – The Chain” greatest hits album. She approached Fleetwood’s manager, and told him “‘You find Mick, and you tell him that if I don’t have those tapes by Monday, I am no longer a member of Fleetwood Mac.'”
The song appeared on Fleetwood’s album, and Nicks officially left the group.
Of course, the climax to this entire story comes with the inclusion of the song in the band’s 1997 reunion performance/live album/concert movie, “The Dance (1997)” where, in a very famous live set at Warner Bros studios in Burbank California, Nicks finally got her moment with the song.
The song sounds beautiful live, with Stevie Nicks taking up the entire universe with her gothic fairy presence as she always does, singing the words with all of her soul, her voice filled with meaning. However, at about 3:43, the third act of the song, Nicks screams the scathing verse at Buckingham while shooting dagger-filled eyes at him. He does not back down, though, and the two partake in the most tension-filled stare-down since “The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly.” It is clearly cathartic for the two, as years of unresolved grief, anger (and horniness?) resurface in this biting rendition, where they both look nothing less like they want to kill each other (and rip each other's clothes off? Maybe?).
Because of this memorable performance, the song came to life, and this time, it was released as a single. Everybody was listening to it. “Then guess what?” Nicks told People, “My mom got thousands of dollars every month for the rest of her life…So it wasn't such a bad gift in the long run after all…But it was a hard road getting there.”
Now, Silver Springs has achieved its third (arguably second) life with its inclusion in the Mac-inspired TV show “Daisy Jones and the Six,” as well as garnering popularity on TikTok (but I knew it before it was cool…or at least…between when it was cool in 1997, and now hehe).
Silver Springs is arguably one of the coolest B-Sides and singles to any album. It is a magnifying glass on the very long and tumultuous story of Fleetwood Mac, and is just a freaking banger for when you want to hate your ex and remember what they’re missing (I have no exes and am in a very happy relationship).