(Credits: Far Out / YouTube Still)
Tue 24 February 2026 16:00, UK
Working on any song meant a lot more than getting the right take for Stevie Nicks.
In many ways, her songs were her musical children, and she wasn’t going to rest until she had something that was absolutely perfect once she walked out of the studio. But whereas some songs might have been the most natural thing in the world, there were more than a few tracks that she had to fight back tears trying to make it through.
Because as much as Rumours was the best-selling album of all time for a while, it’s not exactly the easiest album for any of the band members to talk about. The entire group was going through their emotional baggage and breaking up with each other, so it’s not going to be easy to talk about the darker side of their relationship and then suddenly walk out of the studio like everything was fine. It was a lot to process, but all those emotions demanded to be felt once the tape started rolling.
But while Lindsey Buckingham was reacting in anger most of the time, Nicks always wanted to take the dignified approach. She never wanted to have her relationship with Buckingham end in tears, and even if they had to yell at each other in between takes half the time, ‘Dreams’ was a far more mature way of dealing with her emotions. Buckingham was writing ‘Go Your Own Way’ as an attack on her, but she made sure that her songs were about moving on and letting the rain wash both of them clean.
Then again, not all of Nicks’s songs were the cheeriest thing in the world. There’s a truly demented spirit in ‘Gold Dust Woman’, and there are more than a few times on ‘The Chain’ where the band feel like a powder keg about to explode. But when the record first came out, their producer Ken Callait remembered her being absolutely crushed when she talked about ‘Silver Springs’ getting left out of the track listing.
It makes sense to lose a few tunes for the integrity of the vinyl record at the time, but that didn’t make it any less painful for Nicks. If anything, this was her chance to lay all her cards out on the table about her relationship, and since she had dedicated the song to her mom and even given her royalties, hearing that they were going to record the old Buckingham Nicks song ‘I Don’t Want to Know’ wasn’t the easiest conversation.
Nicks had already felt like she had to compromise far too much, but Callait said that she begrudgingly had to be forced to sing her old tune, saying, “That broke Stevie’s heart – she loved Silver Springs so much. But we needed something shorter, a little uptempo, and out came this kind of country thing she and Lindsey had been doing live.” It’s not like ‘I Don’t Want to Know’ is a bad song, but if you put it next to ‘Silver Springs’, there’s absolutely no contest between them.
‘I Don’t Want to Know’ is a perfectly acceptable pop song, and for a band that was all about making the catchiest tunes, this is the kind of Everly-Brothers-style tune that would have worked as a decent album track. But ‘Silver Springs’ is a goddamn avalanche of emotion every time it comes on, and when you listen to the band playing it at The Dance, it’s abundantly clear that they did the song a disservice by putting it out as a B-side.
Because, really, this is Nicks’s masterpiece, and no matter how many times people pick up Rumours and fall in love for the first time, they’re going to be missing a crucial part of the band’s discography along the way. It’s not the worst move in the world, but without ‘Silver Springs’, Rumours doesn’t exactly tell the full story of what the band were all about.