Young Stevie Nicks Was ‘Eager to Compose’ — ‘All She Needed Was Inspiration’
Stevie Nicks is an award-winning songwriter, creating “Dreams” and “Gold Dust Woman” for Rumours. According to one producer, all the Fleetwood Mac member needed was the inspiration, which she found thanks to her “crumbling relationship with Lindsey [Buckingham.]”
Here’s what Ken Caillat wrote in Making Rumours: The Inside Story of the Classic Fleetwood Mac Album.
Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham wrote songs for Fleetwood Mac
They’ll never break the chain. Nicks and Buckingham recorded music as a duo before joining Fleetwood Mac. After joining, however, they continued to write music for the group. One of the band’s most popular releases, Rumours, featured “Dreams,” “Gold Dust Woman,” and “I Don’t Want to Know” — all written by Nicks.
Stevie Nicks found inspiration from her ‘crumpling relationship with Lindsey,’ according to a ‘Rumours’ producer
The Fleetwood Mac members were the masterminds behind Rumours originals, with all five band members collaborating on “The Chain.” In Making Rumours: The Inside Story of the Classic Fleetwood Mac Album, Caillat and Steve Stiefel detailed their life adjacent to the rock band.
“Stevie was extremely prolific, and she was young and eager to compose,” producer Caillat wrote of the “Edge of Seventeen” artist. “All she needed was the inspiration, which she got plenty of from her crumbling relationship with Lindsey.”
Stevie Nicks wrote Fleetwood Mac’s ‘Silver Springs’ about her relationship with Lindsey Buckingham
Nicks and Buckingham began dating in the 1960s — and broke up by the time Fleetwood Mac recorded Rumours. As a result, original tracks from the 1977 release detailed their relationship and its subsequent end. For Stevie Nicks, that meant the “B-Side” track, “Silver Springs.”
“So I’ll begin not to love you,” some lyrics stated. “Turn around, see me runnin’ / I’ll say I loved you years ago / Tell myself you never loved me, no.”
“I wrote ‘Silver Springs’ about Lindsey. And we were in Maryland somewhere driving under a freeway sign that said Silver Springs, Maryland,” Nicks said (via Far Out Magazine). “And I loved the name…Silver Springs sounded like a pretty fabulous place to me. And ‘You could be my silver springs’, that’s just a whole symbolic thing of what you could have been to me.”
“Like many of us, Stevie learned to fudge with her emotions with a shot of this or a hit of that, always walking that thin line, looking for her own ‘gold dust moment,'” Caillat added in the same memoir.
Buckingham also shared his perspective with “Go Your Own Way” — even if it wasn’t entirely accurate to what happened in the relationship. Nicks even asked him to remove some lyrics but he refused.
Nicks pursued a solo project outside of Fleetwood Mac, even releasing the chart-topping hit “Edge of Seventeen.” Now, music by Nicks is available on most major streaming platforms.
