Fleetwood Mac has never fallen short when it comes to breakup anthems. The messy, riveting and very publicly drawn-out Stevie Nicks-Lindsey Buckingham saga certainly provided ample content: Second Hand News, Dreams, What Makes You Think You’re The One? – so many of the band’s big hits came from the duo’s tumultuous relationship.
Their iconic 1977 album Rumours was a particularly dramatic affair, strewn with a few songs that translate into the two exes addressing each other head on. A great example – probably the most famous of the bunch – is the album’s fifth number: Buckingham’s ode to the pair’s split, Go Your Own Way.
But it’s Silver Springs, the B-side of the song, that has an especially interesting history.
Written by Nicks, Silver Springs offers her perspective of the famous breakup. She pushed hard for the track to be put on the A-side of the record, but it was ultimately excluded both due to vinyl length restrictions and brewing tensions within the band. Richard Dashut, the engineer and co-producer of Rumours, has called it “the best song that never made it to a record album”.
It’s a gorgeous piece of music – really, just imagine that this was the kind of stuff going on your B-side. That’s how good Fleetwood Mac was in the 1970s. But with a mellow rhythm and a pretty unassuming melody, the song doesn’t immediately “sell itself” – as Courtney Love, who covered it in 2016, has explained: “You have to sell it a little bit.” And that’s what Nicks does so well.
To be fair, it’s probably a lot easier to "sell" when the emotions you’re singing with come first-hand.
Nicks borrowed the song’s title from Silver Spring, the small Maryland town whose name she found rather romantic while passing through once on tour, and made the words become a symbol of all that could have been of her past relationship with Buckingham. The song’s tension builds suddenly halfway through, culminating powerfully in the bridge as she sings: “I’ll follow you down ‘til the sound of my voice will haunt you” – scraping for every last shred of voice that she can muster. At the peak of it all, she’s almost howling --- the emotion feels so raw and real, a candid co-existence of spite and sadness (“Was I such a fool?”).
The song was finally included in the 2004 remastered edition of Rumours after experiencing a second lifeline seven years earlier, during the band’s 1997 reunion concert and live album The Dance. For the filmed concert performance, Nicks took full ownership of her song’s moment in the spotlight once again, bringing its due drama to the stage. Halfway through, as the song’s tension rises towards its pinnacle, she turns and faces Buckingham directly, looking him dead in the eye as she sings: “You’ll never get away from the sound of the woman that loves you" --- reminding him and the audience exactly what the song is about. She has since admitted that “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.”
In a 1997 interview with Arizona Republic, Nicks described the song as being a message of anger towards Buckingham: “You will listen to me on the radio for the rest of your life, and it will bug you. I hope it bugs you.” And yet twelve years later, in her 2009 interview with Rolling Stone, she offered a pretty different perspective: “It was me realizing that Lindsey was going to haunt me for the rest of my life, and he has.”
I listen to Silver Springs as Nicks’ reclaiming of her narrative --- in a way reclaiming the upper hand, and yet still from a position of regret. ‘I will haunt you the way you have continued to haunt me’.
Various artists have covered the song over recent years, but Angie McMahon’s take on it stands out above the rest. Angie sells the song in her own beautiful way, bringing out the defiance at its core by putting her rock spin on it. Several paces slower and a bit more minimalist in style, her version is ultimately pulled off by her insane voice. What I especially love is how well she captures all of the conflicting emotions inherent to Nicks’ original thanks to how quickly she can change her vocals. “So I begin not to love you” – she sings so softly in the second verse – but then suddenly kicks in her edgy side with the next line, “Just turn around, you see me running.”
The best showcase of the spectrum of Angie’s voice is, of course, the way she captures the song’s focal build-up. As she approaches the climax of the bridge she starts to fully belt – outpouring everything she can just like Nicks, but with her own distinct grit.
This is a beautiful instance of the way that song covers connect artists over time – in this case, two iconic women: one already long at the peak of her musical success, and the other just getting started.
Happy listening!
Comments