Written by Stevie Nicks, "Silver Springs" was intended for the album Rumours. Years after the fact, Nicks commented that its exclusion from the album marked a growing tension in the band. The track describes Nicks' perspective on the ending of her romantic relationship with guitaristLindsey Buckingham.[3][4] She said:
I wrote "Silver Springs" about Lindsey. And we were in Maryland somewhere driving under a freeway sign that said Silver Springs, Maryland [sic]. And I loved the name… Silver Springs sounded like a pretty fabulous place to me. And 'You could be my silver springs' – that's just a whole symbolic thing of what you could have been to me.[5]
Rolling Stone observed, "Nicks' tender yet vengeful post-mortem on her breakup with Buckingham [became] an emotional lightning rod. The song would have behind-the-scenes repercussions for decades to come – nearly leading to the breakup of the band."[3] For reasons including its length and relatively slow tempo, the song was excluded from Rumours despite strenuous and repeated objections from Nicks.[3] In a 1997 documentary on the making of Rumours, engineer and coproducer Richard Dashut called it "the best song that never made it to a record album".[6] The song was, however, released in late 1976 as the B-side of the "Go Your Own Way" single,[3] a Buckingham-written song about the couple's breakup.[7][8]
Years later, after Fleetwood Mac's Behind the Mask tour concluded, Nicks left the group owing to a dispute with Mick Fleetwood: the drummer would not allow her to release "Silver Springs" on her 1991 album Timespace – The Best of Stevie Nicks because he planned to include it on a forthcoming Fleetwood Mac box set.[9] The song subsequently appeared on the 1992 box set 25 Years – The Chain.[10]
On a remastered edition of Rumours, issued in 2004, "Silver Springs" was included (as a previously unreleased, slightly longer 4:47 version) between "Songbird" and "The Chain". "We always loved her," remarked musician Danielle Haim. "But when we heard 'Silver Springs' – a song that didn't make Rumours and landed on one of the box sets – we fell in love all over again."[11]
The song also appeared on Nicks' compilation Crystal Visions - The Very Best of Stevie Nicks. She wrote in the liner notes that the song was intended as a gift for her mother, who later referred to it as her "rainy day song", and that the exclusion of the song from Rumours was a source of anger for many years.[12] Nicks was particularly upset that "Silver Springs" initially generated little money for her mother, who was gifted publishing rights for the song in the 1970s.[13]
Live version
In 1997, "Silver Springs" got a second life on the reunion album The Dance. Nicks said, "The fiery take on the song that appears in The Dance was 'for posterity… I wanted people to stand back and really watch and understand what [the relationship with Lindsey] was.'"[3]The Dance was recorded across three performances at Warner Bros. Studios in June 1997.[2] "I never thought that 'Silver Springs' would ever be performed onstage [again]," Nicks reflected during a 1997 MTV interview. "My beautiful song just disappeared [20 years ago]. For it to come back around like this has really been special to me."[3]
Jonathan Rush, a program director from WNOK, expressed skepticism that the live recording from The Dance would perform well commercially, saying that the song "doesn't jump off the radio like we'd like it to." He nonetheless found the concept of releasing a reworked and unearthed song to be intriguing.[2] Amanda Petrusich of Pitchfork believed that the song epitomised "the story of how Buckingham and Nicks lost each other" more than any other song before the release of Tusk. She also highlighted the dynamics between Nicks and Buckingham for live performances of the song and described Nicks' voice as "feral" during the "was I just a fool?" lyric.[19]The Guardian and Paste ranked the song number six and number two, respectively, on their lists of the 30 greatest Fleetwood Mac songs.[20][21]
