A-side "Go Your Own Way" Genre Rock, Progressive rock Label Warner Bros./Reprise | Recorded 1976 Length 4:29 | |
Released 1976
1997 (Live re-release) | ||
"Silver Springs" is a song written by Stevie Nicks and performed by Fleetwood Mac. It was originally intended for the band's 1977 album Rumours, but became a B-side to the song "Go Your Own Way", and a live version was eventually released as a single from the 1997 album The Dance.
Contents
History
Written by Stevie Nicks, "Silver Springs" was originally intended for the album Rumours. Years after the fact, Nicks commented that the song's exclusion from the album marked a growing tension in the band. The track's content reportedly came from the ending of the romantic relationship between Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham. She has said,
I wrote "Silver Springs" about Lindsey. And we were in Maryland somewhere driving under a freeway sign that said Silver Spring, Maryland. 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.In face of the limited space available on the LP format of the time, the song was excluded due to its length. In a 1997 documentary on the making of Rumours, Richard Dashut, the engineer and co-producer, called it "The best song that never made it to a record album." The song was, however, released in late 1976 as the B-side of the "Go Your Own Way" single, the Buckingham song to which it is regarded as being a response.
Years later, the band went on a world tour to promote the Fleetwood Mac album Behind the Mask. After the tour concluded, Nicks left the group over a dispute with Mick Fleetwood, who would not allow her to release the track "Silver Springs" on her album Timespace – The Best of Stevie Nicks, because of his plans to release it on a forthcoming Fleetwood Mac box set. The song eventually appeared on the 1992 box set 25 Years – The Chain.
In 1997, the song got a second life on the reunion album The Dance. During the filming of the reunion concert that brought Nicks and Buckingham back to the fold, "Silver Springs" was on the set list. The band earned a Grammy Award for Best Pop Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocals nomination for this live version from The Dance.
The song was played in the season finale of American Horror Story: Coven in which Stevie Nicks guest starred for two episodes.