A lot can happen in one studio session, a lesson Stevie Nicks learned the hard way when Fleetwood Mac decided to include a song Stevie Nicks didn’t want to record on their then-upcoming album, Rumours. Despite her initial trepidations and outbursts, Nicks eventually acquiesced.
The song ended up as the album’s opening track, demoting Nicks’ “Silver Springs” to the B-side single of Lindsey Buckingham’s A-side track, “Go Your Own Way” (ironically, a song he wrote about Nicks).
The Song Stevie Nicks Didn’t Want to Record
According to Making Rumours: The Inside Story of the Classic Fleetwood Mac Album, Stevie Nicks’ management informed the rest of the band that she would be absent from the studio one fateful day in August 1976. It was at this sans-Stevie band meeting that the rest of Fleetwood Mac decided they needed another upbeat song to balance their upcoming record, and Lindsey Buckingham suggested “I Don’t Want to Know.”
The upbeat pop groove was a relic of Buckingham and Nicks’ former folk-rock duo, and the rest of the band was keen to include it. They recorded most of the track without Nicks, deciding without her to cut her song, “Silver Springs,” to make room for the new number. Nicks recalled the moment the band told her what they had decided when she returned to the studio. “I said, ‘Well, I’m not gonna sing ‘“I Don’t Want to Know,”” she said in a 1991 BBC interview. “‘I am one-fifth of this band.’”
“They said, ‘Well, if you don’t like it, you can either (a) take a hike or (b) you better go out there and sing “I Don’t Want to Know,” or you’re only gonna have two songs on the record,’” Nicks continued. “So, basically, with a gun to my head, I went out and sang “I Don’t Want to Know.” And they put “Silver Springs” on the back of “Go Your Own Way.””
The Rest of Fleetwood Mac’s Reaction to the Track
Stevie Nicks’ decision to skip the recording session that one August afternoon helped change the overall feel of Rumours, and if you were to have asked everyone at the studio, they would have said it was for the better. “We hoped that [Nicks] would like what we had done because, in one day, we had a new up-tempo track that felt nearly complete,” producer Ken Caillat recalled in Making Rumours. “At this point in recording the album, we all knew what direction the album needed to go.”
Lindsey Buckingham, however, knew it wouldn’t be so simple. Worrying that Nicks would react more angrily if he told her about the song change, drummer and band co-founder Mick Fleetwood volunteered to break the news. “I’ll handle this,” he said. “I’ll let her know that we’ve all tried, but there’s just no other way to make this record perfect. She’ll just have to trust us.”
Nicks said when she heard about the band’s decision, “I started to scream bloody murder and probably said every horribly mean thing that you could possibly say to another human being” (via Far Out Magazine). But considering the only alternative was to let Buckingham take the song as a solo instead of a duet, Nicks conceded. She tracked her vocals, and the song became Rumours’ opening track.
Nicks changed her tune with the passing of time. “I happen to really like that song,” she said in a later interview (via Far Out). “I love singing that song with Lindsey because that was one of our Everly Brothers singing things that was really close and tight and really fun to sing. So if “Silver Springs” was going to be replaced by anything, “I Don’t Want to Know” was a good replacement.”
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