Stevie Nicks' Ultimate Rebuttal To Go Your Own Way Became A Fan Favorite — And It Wasn't Dreams

Thanks be to Fleetwood Mac's Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks for granting us rock's most endlessly messy relationship feud that lives on in recently divorced boomer playlists and articles such as this. Way back in 1976, Fleetwood Mac released Buckingham's take on his and Nicks' breakup, the blunt, go-for-the-throat "Go Your Own Way," which reached No. 10 on the Billboard Hot 100. It took 20 years for Nicks' ultimate rebuttal to reach fans, and it wasn't "Dreams." It was "Silver Springs," which premiered at 1997's "The Dance" live performance.

For Fleetwood Mac fans, this story is extremely well-known. Back in the mid-70s, amidst Buckingham's and Nicks' not insubstantial relationship problems, Mac released their best-selling album by far, "Rumours," which moved 40 million copies. The LP generated three of the band's top five most listened-to Spotify songs: "Dreams," "The Chain," and "Go Your Own Way." The first became a mega-hit against all odds and reached No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 — Mac's highest-charting song, ever. The Nicks-written lyrics are floaty, mystical, and as dreamy as you'd expect, particularly the talk of "crystal visions." And yes, the song is about her breakup with Buckingham, same as his "Go Your Own Way." 

But Mac recorded another Nicks track that same year about Buckingham that never made it onto "Rumours": The gorgeous "Silver Springs," which Nicks told People is "probably the best song I've ever written." The tune got cut from the album and stayed on the shelf until 1997's "The Dance," when it was given a second life.

Anyone who's watched Fleetwood Mac's "The Dance" from 1997 will probably be in awe — not just at how cohesive, well-practiced, and professional the band is but also at some of the performance's more standout moments. Lindsey Buckingham's "Go Your Own Way" is way rockier, tougher, and more rugged than the band's 1977 original (partly thanks to Buckingham's time-aged, deeper voice). Finally, here is a version of the song that actually lives up to its own sneering attitude, especially the iconic "Packing up, shacking up's all you wanna do" line, which Stevie Nicks once told Rolling Stone wasn't true and felt especially spiteful.

Then there's Nicks' "Silver Springs" from the same performance, which got cut from "Rumours" because it was too languorous and didn't fit with the flow of the album. It's wild at this point to think that fans never knew "Silver Springs" existed until 1997, because the song instantly became beloved amongst Fleetwood Mac's fandom and keeps getting cited again and again to this day. 

In the appropriately titled "The Dance," Nicks rebuts Buckingham's song (which came later in the set) by turning to him in the middle of "Silver Springs" and singing directly to him. The whole scene is honestly chilling and renders Nicks' lyrics haunting, even mortifying, especially the song's "Never get away" refrain, belted in Nicks' now-raspy, dark alto. Her entire delivery of the long-dormant song — including its chorus opener, "Time cast a spell on you / But you won't forget me" — gets her feelings across in a way that "Dreams" never did, no matter its chart-topping heights. It's not hard to see how "Sliver Springs" rose to immediate renown amongst Mac's pantheon of songs.

It was a strange and improbable road from 1977's original "Silver Springs" to its renowned 1997 performance. Speaking to Rolling Stone, producer Ken Caillat called it one of the "best-engineered and best-produced tracks" off of "Rumours." Stevie Nicks loved it, too, and "started to scream bloody murder and probably said every horribly mean thing you could possibly say to another human being" when she learned the song had gotten cut, as she recalled in a BBC radio interview. She was extra disappointed and remorseful because she'd written away the publishing rights as a "dud gift" to her mother, as she told People. On top of this, the song was consigned to B-side status on 1977's "Go Your Own Way" single, which was like adding insult to injury.

We actually don't know how, when, or why Fleetwood Mac decided to include "Silver Springs" in their 1997 "The Dance" set. But when she stepped on stage along with Buckingham and the rest of the band, something came out that had been quiescent for decades. Speaking to the Arizona Republic in 1997 (per The Nicks Fix), Nicks said the group practiced for six weeks before the performance. Yet according to the singer, never once did her feelings come out in the way that they did when the band finally performed it for an audience (Buckingham-directed glares and all). 

Fleetwood Mac performed "Dreams" during "The Dance," too, as their second song in the set. Once the band got to "Silver Springs," though, fans finally got the chance to see a track that deserved to get published 20 years earlier, one that served as the true response to "Go Your Own Way" and became a new, instant fan favorite.