Twenty Years Later She Sang It To His Face Onstage
During the televised performance of The Dance in 1997 Nicks eventually turned toward Buckingham and delivered the song directly at him while he played guitar and sang harmony
The B-side had waited and then it became the scene everyone remembered
Fleetwood Mac cut the breakup song of Stevie Nicks from Rumours and then stuck it on the B-side of the breakup song of Lindsey Buckingham about her
The timing made the rejection sting even more because Nicks and Buckingham had been together for years before joining Fleetwood Mac and survived lean days as a duo before the band suddenly made them famous
By the time Rumours was being made in 1976 their relationship was coming apart while they were still expected to write and record and perform beside one another
Nicks turned that fracture into Silver Springs and the title came from seeing a sign for Silver Spring Maryland while traveling
She liked the name and began imagining it as a place that represented what her relationship with Buckingham might have become
She expected the song to be on Rumours and it was not because the album was already pushing the limits of vinyl running time and Silver Springs was judged too long
The band substituted the shorter Nicks song I Donβt Want to Know and producer Ken Caillat later confirmed that the physical limitations of the LP were part of the reason it was left behind
His Song Became The Hit And Hers Stayed On The Back
For Nicks it felt like losing one of the songs that mattered most to her and then came the placement that made the whole episode almost cruelly symmetrical
Silver Springs was released as the B-side of Go Your Own Way and the own public account of Buckingham of their breakup
His song became one of the defining hits of Fleetwood Mac and hers remained the record people had to turn over to hear
For years that might have been the end of it and it was not
When Fleetwood Mac reunited for The Dance in 1997 Silver Springs returned to the set and twenty years had passed since she wrote it
The performance gave the discarded song a second life and Silver Springs later received a Grammy nomination for Best Pop Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocals
Her Mother Called It The Rainy Day Song
There was one more quiet consequence because Nicks had assigned the royalties of the song to her mother Barbara who called it her rainy day song
The song had been denied the album and it had not been denied a life
So the track that missed Rumours and disappeared into a B-side and spent two decades outside the album eventually became something else entirely as a source of income for her mother and much later one of the performances most closely associated with Stevie Nicks herself
The song waited until the people inside it were older and the story was famous and the wound had turned into history and then Stevie Nicks finally sang it where everyone could see exactly who it had been written for