The Fleetwood Mac classic Mick Fleetwood rejected from ‘Rumours’
When Fleetwood Mac created Rumours, their chaotic personal lives proved to be a neverending source of potential material, providing them with more songs than they could ever release on an album. Moreover, everything the band members wrote was of a ridiculously high standard and came straight from the heart, which meant some exceptional songs were left behind.
Fleetwood Mac couldn’t find room to include ‘Silver Springs’ on the LP, despite Stevie Nicks trying everything within her power to pressure her bandmates to change their mind. While in the modern era of streaming, an album could feasibly have a five-hour running time and include 100 tracks, artists were restricted to roughly 45 minutes. Otherwise, they’d need to make a double album.
While Fleetwood Mac certainly had the songs at their disposal to commit to a double album, Mick Fleetwood wanted to keep Rumours to a trim 12 tracks. Although this was perhaps the right decision as the final product remains a stone-cold classic, there were some tough decisions he had to make along the way, none more agonising than the omission of ‘Silver Springs’.
The heartfelt track was penned about the breakdown of her relationship with bandmate Lindsey Buckingham and the utopia she dreamed of creating with him before they parted ways. As much as Fleetwood felt it was an excellent exhibition of Nicks’ songwriting, it was inappropriate for his vision of Rumours.
Reflecting on the snub with Apple Music’s Zane Lowe, the drummer claimed that Nicks made him “suffer inordinately” for casting ‘Silver Springs’ to the side. He told the radio host: “I ended up in a car park having to tell young Stevie that… a great song – and truly, truly, truly, truly, we were so intent on [including it]… at that point when you master an album, getting it to sound, and we simply couldn’t, unless we sacrificed the level of the dynamic of the album, when you put the needle down.”
Fleetwood continued: “And we just felt something had to go, and then that was the song… But that song became legendary, but no doubt was really supposed to be part of this album. And it was a forever… Like I was the Grim Reaper in the car park, that had to break the news, and Stevie’s made me suffer inordinately ever since.”
While ‘Silver Springs’ is a track deserving of a place on almost any album, Fleetwood Mac later found an appropriate place for the composition when it served as the B-side to ‘Go Your Own Way’, which was Buckingham’s break-up song and told his version of events. Hearing these tracks side-by-side is the perfect setting to appreciate their brilliance within a wider context of events.
Listen to ‘Silver Springs’ below.
