4 days ago
I Loved Stevie Nicks‘s 'Silver Springs' for Years—Then a Breakup Made Me Actually Understand It
After teasing some sort of reconciliation through cryptic Instagram posts, Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham formally announced on Wednesday that they'll be reissuing Buckingham Nicks—the long-forgotten album they released as a duo in 1973 before joining Fleetwood Mac—this September. Considering that the former on-again, off-again couple has been quite publicly feuding since Buckingham was asked to leave the band in 2018 (allegedly at Nicks's request), the news is surprising, to say the least.
Over the decades, Buckingham and Nicks's tumultuous relationship yielded some of the greatest breakup songs ever written: tracks like 'Go Your Own Way,' 'Never Going Back Again,' 'Dreams,' and Nicks's spellbinding ballad 'Silver Springs,' which has gone somewhat viral in recent years.
I was a shy 16-year-old when I first heard 'Silver Springs,' and it immediately became an obsession. Never mind that I'd never been in a relationship (I'd barely even been kissed); the pleading lyrics and the unfiltered anguish with which Nicks sang about splitting from her longtime boyfriend and musical partner in 1976 changed my world. Soon, I had no fewer than five different recordings of it on repeat: demos, live versions, and the final cut. My favorite was 'Silver Springs (Sessions, Roughs & Outtakes),' featured on one of the countless re-releases of Fleetwood Mac's 1977 album Rumours. It's angrier than the final version and less polished—Nicks at her best, in my opinion.
The song came about when, while driving on the freeway, Nicks saw a sign for Silver Springs, Maryland, and loved the name. 'It sounded like a pretty fabulous place to me,' she later told Rolling Stone. 'It's a whole symbolic thing of what [Lindsey] could have been to me.' But due to its length and tempo, 'Silver Springs' was criminally left off Rumours' original tracklist.
It was eventually revived with The Dance, the band's hit live album in 1997, and all that old tension culminated in a version even more powerful than the studio cut. From then on, during performances, Nicks would turn her mic stand to face her ex directly, and sing the words she had written about him years prior while Buckingham strummed and harmonized back at her.
