The Fleetwood Mac Song that Inspired ‘Daisy Jones and the Six’
It's no secret that Daisy Jones & the Six, the new Amazon streaming series based on Taylor Jenkins Reid's 2019 novel of the same name, is heavily inspired by the interpersonal romantic tumult of Fleetwood Mac. In the wake of the show's release, viewers have flocked to social media to identify a pivotal Fleetwood Mac performance that served as the basis for the book.
Daisy Jones & the Six chronicles the rise and spectacular implosion of the fictional '70s rock band, led by frontman Billy Dunne and titular frontwoman Daisy Jones. Their intense personal and musical chemistry propels them to staggering success while also threatening to derail the band, and they work through their complicated emotions via song.
Sounds similar to Fleetwood Mac's tempestuous ex-power couple, Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham, doesn't it? Plenty of viewers agree, and they're recirculating footage of the band's performance of the song "Silver Springs" to prove their point.
Originally written for 1977's Rumours but cut from the LP due to time constraints, the Nicks-penned "Silver Springs" addresses the dissolution of her and Buckingham's relationship with lyrics such as "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." Fleetwood Mac revived the song for their 1997 live album The Dance, recorded on May 23, 1997, at Warner Brothers Studios in Burbank, Calif. In the official live video, Nicks and Buckingham make intense eye contact as they harmonize over pointed lyrics such as, "You'll never get away from the sound of the woman that loved you."
Watch Fleetwood Mac Perform 'Silver Springs' Live in 1997
Jenkins Reid confirmed that the performance inspired one of Daisy Jones' original songs, "Regret Me," in a 2019 interview with The Guardian. "It's not lyrically based on 'Silver Springs' at all, and it wouldn't sound anything like it, but that concept of a woman's right to be angry is absolutely based on Stevie Nicks singing 'Silver Springs' at Lindsey Buckingham during their reunion [album and] show, The Dance," the author said.
"The couple of clips from that show I saw as a teenager were why I started listening to Fleetwood Mac," she continued. "They were always, for me, more than just music. I have always been very moved by Stevie Nicks singing that song the way she did then."
Actor Sam Claflin, who plays Billy Dunne, recently told Elle that a friend also sent him the "Silver Springs" performance and told him to use it as inspiration. "He was like, 'Just channel this mate,'" Claflin said. He shared it with castmate Riley Keough, who plays Daisy, and she was similarly impressed.
"She's like, 'Whoa, this is Billy and Daisy,'" he recalled. "So I think we kind of, in a sense, wanted to channel that through the process."
Much like its real-life counterpart, "Regret Me" also gets subjected to scrutiny in Daisy Jones, as Billy votes to keep it off their album, Aurora, even though the rest of the band loves it. The decision to cut "Silver Springs" from Rumours gutted Nicks — and packaging it as the B-side to Buckingham's scathing breakup tune "Go Your Own Way" was a bold move.
"They took me out to the parking lot and said, 'We're taking "Silver Springs" off the record because it's too long,'" Nicks wrote in the Rumours reissue liner notes (via Rolling Stone). "Needless to say, I didn't react well to that. Eventually, I said, 'What song are you going to put on the album instead?' They said, 'We recorded "I Don't Want to Know,"' and I think Lindsey thought it would be OK with me because I wrote it. But I wasn't OK with it. That always put a shadow over 'I Don't Want to Know,' unfortunately – even though I love it and it came out great."
Nicks got her vindication when "Silver Springs" was nominated for Best Pop Performance by a Duo or Group With Vocals at the 1998 Grammy Awards. "You have to realize that 'Silver Springs' was so genuinely kicked off the record 20 years ago, and I was so genuinely devastated ... because I loved the song and it was one of the Rumours songs," she told MTV in 1997. "So I never thought that 'Silver Springs' would ever be performed onstage, would ever be heard of again. My beautiful song just disappeared. So for it to come back around like this has really been really special to me."