'The sound of my voice will haunt you.' The story behind Fleetwood Mac's 'Silver Springs'.

Stevie Nicks' and Lindsey Buckingham's tumultuous relationship will always live on in their hit songs. The melodies we hum in the supermarket on a rainy Tuesday night, and the lyrics we belt out on the dancefloor after one too many house wines. 

Their story is one of heady first love, a quick rise to fame, life on the road, jealousy, regret and sorrow. 

It's one of the most enthralling love stories of the 20th century, but it's a love story we didn't really understand the gravity of until a much anticipated reunion performance in 1997. 

Watch Fleetwood Mac perform 'Silver Springs'. Post continues below. 

Nicks and Buckingham first met in the 1960s when they were teenagers. According to the Los Angeles Times, Nicks saw Buckingham at a party and decided to approach him. 

He was playing 'California Dreamin' by The Mamas & The Papas on his guitar and she sang along beside him.

"I just threw in my Michelle Phillips Harmony, and he was so beautiful," Nicks told Courtney Love in an interview for Spin magazine in 1997.

Afterwards, she introduced herself. They didn't see each other again until a few years later, when Buckingham called Nicks up and asked her to join his band. 

"And within two or three months we were opening for Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, all the San Francisco bands. Two years later, we packed up and moved to Los Angeles with about 12 demos," she recalled in that 1997 interview. 

The pair became romantically involved and formed the duo Buckingham & Nicks. 

"I loved him before he was a millionaire. We were two kids out of Menlo-Atherton High School," Nicks later said in a television interview. "I loved him for all the right reasons. We did have a great relationship at first. I loved taking care of him and the house."

The fairytale didn't last long though. In December 1974, when Mick Fleetwood asked Buckingham to join Fleetwood Mac, they were on the verge of splitting up. They decided to work through their problems for the sake of their careers. 

It worked. At least for little awhile. 

"We were sailing along on the highest wave. It was OK for a while until it wasn’t. At the end of 1976, that’s when it just blew up," Nicks later told Billboard.

The band was working on their album Rumours when they split. Many of the lyrics from the hit songs we know and love are merely Nicks and Buckingham working through the hurt and the anger of their breakup. 

Buckingham wrote 'Second Hand News', 'Never Going Back Again' and 'Go Your Own Way' about Nicks who responded with 'Dreams'.

There was one particular lyric from 'Go Your Own Way' which really upset Nicks and she had to sing it, continually, throughout her career. 

"I very much resented him telling the world that 'packing up, shacking up' with different men was all I wanted to do. He knew it wasn't true. It was just an angry thing he said," she later told Rolling Stone. 

"Every time those words would come out onstage, I wanted to go over and kill him. He knew it, so he really pushed my buttons through that."

But there was one song that didn't make the album. 'Silver Springs' was Nicks' tribute to the fairytale ending that never was. The song was named after a town they passed through on tour. 

"It sounded like a pretty fabulous place to me," she said in the Classic Albums documentary about Rumours. "It’s a whole symbolic thing of what [Lindsey] could have been to me."

The album was nearly finished when Mick Fleetwood took Nicks out to the carpark and told her 'Silver Springs' was being cut because it was too long and "a lot of [other] reasons". 

"I started to scream bloody murder and probably said every horribly mean thing that you could possibly say to another human being and walked back in the studio completely flipped out," she recalled during a BBC Radio interview in 1991.

'Silver Springs' was delegated to the b-side of a single and performed by the band only a handful of times in the 1970s and 1980s, before it was mostly forgotten about. 

Then in 1997, Nicks finally got her 'Silver Springs' moment. 

While taping a Fleetwood Mac reunion show later released as The Dance, Nicks sang 'Silver Springs' to Buckingham the way it was intended.

Midway through the song, she turned and faced Buckingham as she sang the song's sorrowful 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 former flames looked into each other's eyes, as they sang: 

"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." 

In the decades since, 'Silver Springs' and that moment on stage have come to represent something even more meaningful than what Nicks could have imagined when she first penned in the lyrics in mid-1970s. 

The song is a reminder of the passing of time. Of sorrow and regret. And the fairytale endings we must learn to let go of. 

Feature Image: Getty.

Keryn Donnelly is Mamamia's Pop Culture Editor. For her weekly TV, film and book recommendations and to see photos of her dog, follow her on Instagram and TikTok. 

Do you have children/step-children aged 1-4 years? We want to hear from you - take our short survey to go in the running to win a $50 gift voucher!