1976 · Behind the Songs
Stevie Nicks’s farewell to Lindsey Buckingham — cut from Rumours, kept alive on a B-side.
Written during the Rumours sessions in Sausalito in 1976, “Silver Springs” was Stevie Nicks’s rawest account of her breakup with Lindsey Buckingham — recorded while the two were still in the same band, singing at each other across the studio. When the album ran too long, this was the song that had to go: “I Don’t Want to Know” took its place, and Nicks was furious. Instead of disappearing, the track surfaced as the B-side of “Go Your Own Way” in December 1976 — a quiet act of preservation that let the song reach everyone who flipped the single over.
For two decades it lived in the margins, until the band’s 1997 reunion. On The Dance, Nicks sang it straight at Buckingham with twenty years of hindsight in her voice, and that live version earned a Grammy nomination for Best Pop Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocals. Reissues of Rumours finally gave it an official album home. Few B-sides have traveled so far from the cutting-room floor to vindication.