Silver Springs: So Much More than the Stare

I don’t need to tell you that Stevie Nicks is amazing. Almost every female rockstar is revered as a god, and Stevie Nicks is amongst the most deserving. Her witch-y aesthetic is so iconic it practically created the image of the urban witch you find in Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Teen Wolf. Moreover, she’s a fantastic songwriter with dozens of hits under her belt. But I’m a bit worried that her incredible theatrics, presentation, and narrative have ultimately distracted too much from the incredible work done by Nicks and her bandmates.

My main example for this is the incredible live video for Fleetwood Mac’s fantastic Silver Springs. Like so much of Rumours, the album the song was cut from, the song hits the perfect intersection of pop and rock to where the song isn’t limp or lacking in anything, but is still completely pleasant and something you could listen to alongside whatever a radio station would put on. The song doesn’t lack in tension or momentum nor does it lose itself in wild riffs and groove, instead it moves steadily in a mid-tempo pace, allowing the emotions to stew. And hoo-boy are there some emotions.

Here is where you might expect me to get into how every member of Fleetwood Mac hated each other, how they constantly fought, and how you can even see it in the way Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham stare each other down in the video, but I don’t think this song is about hatred at all. The comments on the video talk about how this song is Lindsey Buckingham’s funeral, how Nicks obliterates him with a minute-long glare. I won’t deny that the image is powerful, but it’s theatre. They looked at each other at the end of this song whenever they played it, it was never a one-off thing, and that doesn’t diminish the power of the words, they’re aiming these lines at each other for good reason. The narrative of Nicks and Buckingham’s turbulent relationship harms this songs memory.

To me, this song is not defined by the lines “You will never get away from the sound of the woman that loved you” but instead by “Baby, I don’t wanna know”. This is not a song about how terrible Buckingham is and how much better Nicks is than his new girlfriend, but about regret. The hardest-hitting moments in the song to me are in the refrains where Nicks asks about Buckingham’s new girl before backing off, and the moment where she says “I say, ‘I loved you years ago’ / Tell myself you never loved me, no”. There is a powerful insecurity there, in acknowledging that in the same way Nicks refuses to let Buckingham go away unscathed, Nicks herself is hurt. She tells herself he never loved her, but she still asks about his new girl.

For as incredible a performer as Nicks is, she might just be a better writer.