*The Free Spirit*

SILVER SPRINGS Fleetwood Mac — The Dance (1997)

By 1997, Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham’s romance should have been ancient history. The pair had split two decades prior, fueling Rumours’ famously raw breakup anthems. But during a taping of a Fleetwood Mac reunion show later released as The Dance, shit once again got very real. Midway through a non-album rarity called “Silver Springs,” Nicks turned and faced her former flame as she sang the song’s rueful bridge: “Time cast a spell on you, but you won’t forget me / I know I could have loved you but you would not let me.” The pair locked eyes, and Nicks gradually built to a cathartic howl — “I’ll follow you down ‘til the sound of my voice will haunt you / You’ll never get away from the sound of the woman that loves you” — indicating that, for her at least, resolution had never really come.

This was by design. Nicks has admitted that the fiery take on the song that appears in The Dance was “for posterity,” as she told Rolling Stone at the time. “I wanted people to stand back and really watch and understand what [the relationship with Lindsey] was,” she later told Arizona Republic.

The track’s primary exposure was as a B side to “Go Your Own Way” — Buckingham’s own expression of anger and revenge against Nicks, where he claimed that “packin’ up, shackin’ up is all you wanna do.” The song would become one of the band’s biggest hits, charting in the Top 10. “He knew it wasn’t true. It was just an angry thing that he said,” Nicks told Rolling Stone in 1997 of the “packin’ up, shackin’ up” line. “Every time those words would come onstage, I wanted to go over and kill him. He knew it. He really pushed my buttons through that. It was like, ‘I’ll make you suffer for leaving me.’ And I did.”

Of course, Nicks had the exact same motivation when she wrote “Silver Springs.” In a 1997 interview with Arizona Republic, she explained the song’s message as “I’m so angry with you. You will listen to me on the radio for the rest of your life, and it will bug you. I hope it bugs you.”