After teasing some sort of reconciliation through cryptic Instagram posts, Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham formally announced on Wednesday that they’ll be reissuing Buckingham Nicks—the long-forgotten album they released as a duo in 1973 before joining Fleetwood Mac—this September. Considering that the former on-again, off-again couple has been quite publicly feuding since Buckingham was asked to leave the band in 2018 (allegedly at Nicks’s request), the news is surprising, to say the least.
Over the decades, Buckingham and Nicks’s tumultuous relationship yielded some of the greatest breakup songs ever written: tracks like “Go Your Own Way,” “Never Going Back Again,” “Dreams,” and Nicks’s spellbinding ballad “Silver Springs,” which has gone somewhat viral in recent years.
I was a shy 16-year-old when I first heard “Silver Springs,” and it immediately became an obsession. Never mind that I’d never been in a relationship (I’d barely even been kissed); the pleading lyrics and the unfiltered anguish with which Nicks sang about splitting from her longtime boyfriend and musical partner in 1976 changed my world. Soon, I had no fewer than five different recordings of it on repeat: demos, live versions, and the final cut. My favorite was “Silver Springs (Sessions, Roughs Outtakes),” featured on one of the countless re-releases of Fleetwood Mac’s 1977 album Rumours. It’s angrier than the final version and less polished—Nicks at her best, in my opinion.
The song came about when, while driving on the freeway, Nicks saw a sign for Silver Springs, Maryland, and loved the name. “It sounded like a pretty fabulous place to me,” she later told Rolling Stone. “It’s a whole symbolic thing of what [Lindsey] could have been to me.” But due to its length and tempo, “Silver Springs” was criminally left off Rumours’ original tracklist.
It was eventually revived with The Dance, the band’s hit live album in 1997, and all that old tension culminated in a version even more powerful than the studio cut. From then on, during performances, Nicks would turn her mic stand to face her ex directly, and sing the words she had written about him years prior while Buckingham strummed and harmonized back at her.
I was entranced by the song from my first listen as a teenager. But it was a decade before I finally, truly understood it.
At 26, I found myself reliving a breakup that had happened more than two years prior: against the advice of friends, family, and therapists, my ex-boyfriend and I stayed in touch for more than a year after our relationship ended, until a big fight finally made us call it for good. (Of course, I couldn’t be too hard on myself about this; it took Nicks 40 years to go no-contact with Buckingham—and even that didn’t last.) For a while, I felt like I was over it. But then some light Instagram stalking led me to his new girlfriend.
After Nicks and Buckingham broke up in 1976, he quickly moved on, even bringing his new girlfriend along on tour. (And this, mind you, is not close to the most insane thing that happened in Fleetwood Mac.) Luckily for me, living in a different city meant that my chances of encountering either my ex or the girlfriend were low—but social media, working as it does, still managed to make the relationship feel inescapable.
I shouldn’t know what a girl I’ve never met—and probably never will—looks like, and I certainly shouldn’t be able to consult her educational and professional history to form theories about her personality. But I did, and that’s how I found myself clinging to every lyric of “Silver Springs” in a way I never had before.
Like Nicks, I had questions that I didn’t actually want the answers to: Don’t say that she’s pretty / And did you say that she loved you? / Baby, I don’t wanna know.
Uselessly, I yearned for confirmation that he’d never find someone like me again: Time cast a spell on you, but you won’t forget me.
And, selfishly, I wanted him to keep on being reminded of me, even after he took up with someone new: I’ll follow you down ’til the sound of my voice will haunt you.
More than I could as a teenager, I now understood that “Silver Springs” was about wanting to know that you meant something to someone, even if your time together was over. It was about hoping that the time you did have together didn’t go to waste.
Eventually, I learned to be comfortable without those assurances—to sit with the uncertainty and quit searching for validation outside of myself. And I began to see the value in just how much I’d changed since first falling in love with “Silver Springs” at 16. After all, the distance from who I was then had only brought me that much closer to Stevie Nicks.