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Mon 31 August 2026 2:00, UK
Everybody’s first, and surely biggest fan, is their mother, and so, it’s no wonder that so many artists, from Elvis and Bob Dylan to Paul McCartney and Stevie Nicks, try to give something back through their art to those women who gave them everything in the first place.
The very first recording that an 18-year-old Elvis Presley ever made, a cut of the 1948 song by Betty Peterson Blasco and Borney Bergantine, ‘My Happiness’, was pressed onto an acetate that he then gave as a gift to his mother, Gladys. And then there have been songs like ‘I’ll Always Love My Mama’ by The Intruders, ‘The Best Day’ by Taylor Swift and ‘Coat of Many Colours’ by Dolly Parton. In each of them, the singers are giving the gift of music to their mothers, but in 1976, Stevie Nicks gave her mother the gift of song in a much more literal and legal sense.
Written in the midst of those mythologically fraught, messy and stormy sessions that gave the world Rumours, ‘Silver Springs’ was a song she felt strongly about. And one that her mother, Barbara, must have done, too, going as far as to call it her favourite out of all the songs her daughter had written.
What better gift could you give to the person who made and most loves you than something that you have in turn made that they love, as well? Most people in her position would maybe have bought their mother a car or a house, but Nicks knew what she was doing and went one better. She assigned the rights to ‘Silver Springs’ to her mother, without telling the rest of her Fleetwood Mac bandmates, believing that the song would generate enough royalties in perpetuity that her mum would never need to worry about not writing any other passive-income-generating songs ever again.
Or that was the plan, anyway. And it probably would have worked wonders, too, if only the song had remained on the album it was written for. In a sprawling series of sessions that had already seen their fair share of fireworks, more sparks were being lit when Mick Fleetwood took Nicks aside and told her that they couldn’t find any space on the record for the song she’d worked so hard on, and which meant so much to her.
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Ironically, the song is Nicks’ devastating account of her (first) breakup from Lindsey Buckingham, which took place right at the start of the sessions, and it would be this song that set her breakup from the rest of the band in motion, as well.
Though Nicks was the last to find out, the rest of the band had already gotten together and decided to cut the track from the release, suggesting that at four minutes long, it was taking up too much space on the already overlong record. By the time they told her, the decision seemed final, and they suggested that she instead record the shorter ‘I Don’t Want to Know’ for the record.
As something of a consolation, or perhaps something of an afterthought, ‘Silver Springs’ was included as the B-side to ‘Go Your Own Way’, the first single from Rumours, and a song written from the other side of the breakup divide by Buckingham.
Years later, when Nicks was compiling the tracklisting for her first Greatest Hits collection, Timespace: The Best of Stevie Nicks, she wanted to include ‘Silver Springs’ to give the track more chance of being heard, but, once again, Mick Fleetwood had other ideas.
Once again, he tried to nix the inclusion of the track, but at least this time it was because he wanted to put the track on his own project, a Fleetwood Mac retrospective which could use any rarities or obscure songs to help the promotional appeal of the box set. That was no consolation to Nicks, though, who sent a message to her long-time bandmate through his manager, saying, “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.”
When they never arrived, it wasn’t only Stevie Nicks who walked out of the band, but Christine McVie left with her, too, in solidarity. Mick Fleetwood’s Fleetwood Mac box set, 25 Years: The Chain, finally arrived a year later, including, on side two, ‘Silver Springs’.
The first breakup never seems to stick when it comes to Stevie Nicks and the members of Fleetwood Mac, though, and so it proved again this time around. Before long, the band were back together, performing ‘Silver Springs’ to an awed MTV audience in 1997, which went on to be released as part of their live album, The Dance, and earned a Grammy nomination for ‘Best Pop Performance’ along the way.
Around this time, Barbara Nicks finally got her first royalty check through for the song she hadn’t written all those years earlier, and which was only now, finally, being recognised as one of the best Fleetwood Mac tracks. Stevie later said of that $50,000 royalty statement that “to my mother, it had been a million-dollar cheque”.
Joking that any money generated from the track would come in handy one day down the line, Barbara Nicks had always referred to it as her “rainy day song”. To paraphrase another song written by Jimmy Van Heusen and Johnny Burke, it was funny, and, in 1997, it seemed that rainy day was finally here.
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