SONG OF THE DAY

“Sil­ver Springs” by Fleet­wood Mac (The Dance, Warner Bros./ Reprise Records, 1997). Writ­ten by Ste­vie Nicks.

MY TAKE

This song seems to seri­ously want me to blog about it this week! First, I’m singing along to it as I’m cre­at­ing a birth­day playlist for my Aunt Di (find the playlist below! The song makes the final cut!), and it stays with me hum­m­ingly for a few days after I fin­ish that project. Then, when I’m not even over hum­ming the song on a daily basis yet, I see Kate Hud­son a capella croon­ing the song on Bravo’s The Rachel Zoe Project—jigga what!?! Here’s the video link for that clip, it’s about one minute in.

So then I’m like “okay okay I’ll write about you, song!” and I begin this blog entry, only to then dis­cover that the ver­sion I know and love is actu­ally from the 1990’s and is live, not from the Fleet­wood Mac hey­day of the 1970s and studio-produced (which if you know me, you know I pre­fer a good stu­dio pro­duc­tion to any­thing with crowd sounds and bad mics). Ste­vie Nicks’ voice appar­ently did not change through the decades. I included both ver­sions in the Video of the Day sec­tion below for your com­par­i­son. I think it’s rather obvi­ous that the live stripped down 1997 ver­sion is supe­rior, but judge for yourself!

INTERESTING FACTS (a la wikipedia)

- “Sil­ver Springs“ was orig­i­nally intended for the band’s 1977 album Rumours, but became a B-side to the song “Go Your Own Way”, and was even­tu­ally released as a sin­gle from the 1997 album The Dance.

- Years after the fact, Nicks com­mented that in a way, its lack of inclu­sion on the effort marked a grow­ing ten­sion in the band. The group has three great writ­ers, and only so many slots.

- The track’s inher­ent long­ing report­edly came from the end­ing of the roman­tic rela­tion­ship between Nicks and Lind­sey Buckingham.

- Years later, the band went on a world tour to pro­mote the Fleet­wood Mac album Behind The Mask. After the tour con­cluded, Nicks left the group over a dis­pute with Mick Fleet­wood, who would not allow her to release the track “Sil­ver Springs” on her album Time­space – The Best of Ste­vie Nicks, because of his plans to release it on a forth­com­ing Fleet­wood Mac box set. The song even­tu­ally appeared on the 1992 box set 25 Years – The Chain.

- In 1997, the song got a sec­ond life on the reunion album The Dance. Dur­ing the film­ing of the reunion con­cert that brought Nicks and Buck­ing­ham back to the fold, “Sil­ver Springs” was on the set list.

- Nicks earned a Rock Vocal Per­for­mance Grammy nom­i­na­tion for this live ver­sion from The Dance.

- The Dance is a live per­for­mance by Fleet­wood Mac, released on CD and VHS in 1997, and later on DVD. It hailed the return of the band’s most suc­cess­ful line-up of Lind­sey Buckingham, Mick Fleetwood,Christine McVie, John McVie and Ste­vie Nicks, who had not released an album together since 1987’s Tango in the Night.

- The Dance was the first Fleet­wood Mac release to top the US album charts since 1982’s Mirage.

- Debut­ing at #1 in the Bill­board 200, The Dance became the 5th best-selling live album of all time in the United States, with over 5 mil­lion copies sold there.

- The con­cert was recorded for Fleet­wood Mac’s MTV Spe­cial “The Dance” at Warner Broth­ers Stu­dios in Bur­bank, Cal­i­for­nia on May 23, 1997, and fea­tures the Uni­ver­sity of South­ern Cal­i­for­nia March­ing Band­who per­form on the tracks “Tusk” (hav­ing played on the orig­i­nal stu­dio record­ing) and “Don’t Stop”.

- Although pre­dom­i­nantly a live great­est hits pack­age, The Dance also fea­tures new mate­r­ial writ­ten by each of the pri­mary song­writ­ing mem­bers of the band (two from Buck­ing­ham) as well as pop­u­lar album tracks. For exam­ple, “Bleed to Love Her” was a pre­vi­ously unre­leased track when this album was released, although the song was later recorded dur­ing the Say You Will sessions.

- The album cover, taken by David LaChapelle, has Mick Fleet­wood and Ste­vie Nicks par­tially recre­at­ing their pose from Rumours, the band’s most suc­cess­ful album.

- This album spawned two sin­gles; “Land­slide” and “Sil­ver Springs”.

- Fleet­wood Mac are a British-American rock band formed in 1967 in Lon­don. The only orig­i­nal mem­ber present in the band is its name­sake drummer, Mick Fleetwood.

- The two most suc­cess­ful peri­ods for the band were dur­ing the late 1960s British blues boom, when they were led by gui­tarist Peter Green, and from 1975 to 1987, with more pop-orientation, fea­tur­ing Chris­tine McVie, Lindsey Buck­ing­ham and Ste­vie Nicks.

PLAYLIST

This is the playlist I recently cre­ated for my Aunt Di on her birth­day. She has incred­i­ble taste in music, and loves Dar Williams and Wilco, so this playlist attempts to stay in that vein of music, if that can even serve as a definition:

TOP 10 ALL-TIME FAVORITE FLEETWOOD MAC SONGS

1. Over My Head (Fleet­wood Mac/ 1975—They had two self-titled albums, this is the 2nd one; the first one was in 1968)
2. Hold Me (Mirage)
3. Lit­tle Lies (Tango In The Night)
4. Mon­day Morn­ing (Fleet­wood Mac/ 1975)
5. Sec­ond­hand News (Rumours)
6. Sil­ver Springs (The Dance)
7. Beau­ti­ful Child (Tusk)
8. The Chain (Rumours)
9. World Turn­ing (Fleet­wood Mac/ 1975)
10. Say You Love Me (Fleet­wood Mac/ 1975)

VIDEO OF THE DAY

Live per­for­mance from 1997’s The Dance (my pre­ferred take and instru­men­tal arrange­ment of the song:

The orig­i­nal studio/ album ver­sion, for com­par­i­son with the 1997 live version’s instru­men­tal arrangement: