(Credits: Far Out / YouTube Still)
Tue 18 November 2025 19:35, UK
Life in Fleetwood Mac is so rocky that even the crew of the mythical Mary Celeste would look at their own cursed disposition as relative peace.
The height of their dysfunctionality was so extreme that the new TV series Daisy Jones & The Six, which is loosely based on their prolonged, hectic period, had to tone down the drama for the sake of believability. For cynics, this makes them little more than a musical soap opera; for fans, it adds a wallop of energy and sincerity to their work. No song symbolises that quite like ‘Silver Springs’.
In 1974, when the fading band were in the market for a guitarist and a revival, Lindsey Buckingham was the man they had in mind. They auditioned him, he passed, but an impasse soon arrived: he informed the band that he strictly comes as a pair with Stevie Nicks. Fleetwood Mac were not interested in hiring a singer so they stepped back… for about five seconds before ultimately agreeing.
The success that instantly followed brought about an extended spell on the road, and this stress caused cracks to appear. John and Christine McVie began divorce proceedings, and Buckingham and Nicks, who had previously seemed so close that their break-up was like splitting an atom, and Mick Fleetwood was also divorcing his wife, Jenny. Meanwhile, they were all developing addictions to cocaine, alcohol or both.
So, in a state of despair, Nicks set about writing ‘Silver Springs’ about an idyllic-sounding town that they passed through on the road—a symbol of the sweet life she could have had with Buckingham if it wasn’t for the rigours of the road. One of the lesser-known anthems that Nicks wrote about Buckingham, the song is the touching lament of a fading dream. The Rumours period proved to be so much of a purple patch for songs about love and hate that some tracks were forced off the album by logistics alone.
Buckingham Nicks as a duo. (Credits: Far Out / Polydor)
Back in the day, a standard album was limited to around 45 minutes of audio. That was simply all you could fit on a standard 12-inch worth of vinyl; thus, unless the record label was willing to foot the sizable bill of a double-LP, then some songs wouldn’t make the record. ‘Silver Springs’ tragically ended up on the cutting room floor. As the album’s co-producer Richard Dashut once proclaimed: “[It’s] the best song that never made it to a recorded album.”
The song itself is yet another silver lining to the sad Nick / Buckingham break-up. “I’ll follow you down till the sound of my voice will haunt you,” Nicks emotively purrs and 2009, she told Rolling Stone: “It was me realising that Lindsey was going to haunt me for the rest of my life, and he has.” She believed that the song might do the same for Buckingham.
The track is perhaps one of the more covert but certainly one of the more powerful punches thrown between the former couple. The two would indeed spend the majority of their time in Fleetwood Mac fighting, even as the decades passed.
Given that Rumours was littered with tracks that Buckingham had written about her, it was a particular sore spot for Nicks that Mick Fleetwood had told her that they simply couldn’t fit her effort on the album. Alas, she acquiesced… until it got even sorer a few twisted years down the line.
In 1990, Nicks approached Fleetwood once again and asked him whether she could include the track on her forthcoming solo effort. He refused.
It was a tough decision to accept. The tune had never really been give the space it deserved with the band but it was now being withheld form the songwriter for seemingly no reason. Nicks hadn;t just been bruised by Buckingham but by the band’s ‘Daddy’, too.
And with that, she curtly walked away from the band, prompting her friend Christine McVie to join her in the exodus. However, as we now know, in typical fashion, the Rumours line-up reunited in 1997 and have been enjoying the rocky ride of the riddled band ever since.
In this sense, the song now resides as a sort of meta-anthem that underpins Fleetwood Mac. “Silver Springs sounded like a pretty fabulous place to me,” Nicks said. “And ‘You could be my silver springs’, that’s just a whole symbolic thing of what you could have been to me.” And yet this painful emblem of what could have been remains a thing of beauty—a thing of beauty that has both blighted the band and served as a sign of their defiance; just another kink in the lustrous chain of the band.
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