Incredibly, IKWKOLTI is still "Alive & Kicking" --- which I believe to be the only Nields song which has never dropped out of Nields set list rotation since 1994. I first heard IKWKOLTI on 12/31/94 in Hartford, at my second show. Only BBD, which was first played 4/22/95, has been as constant as that. "James" was unsinkable at one point too, but even that one got sunk into the Limbo of the Lost, before the Probe brought it back some time ago.

My theory about IKWKOLTI is twofold. One: it fills a niche that no other song in their repertoire fills. Two: Cry Cry Cry covering it helped inject new life into the song --- gave it a shot in the arm. Would that more artists would help out TN in just this same way.

Incidentally, there are two miniscule changes in the way N&K play IKWKOLTI, compared to both TN Greta version and Cry Cry Cry's version.

N&K sing the harmony now more like Cry Cry Cry did it, which they've even explicitly acknowledged. When TN sang, "With Buster Brown, the big man in the town..." and "How she lost the game, she'll never be the same," that was always just Katryna --- although during Katryna's polyp and post-polyp vocal woes period, Nerissa very often sang the lead on IKWKOLTI to spell Katryna. Nerissa also assumed lead vocals on "Cary," at least, which is done by Katryna on Mousse.

Boy do I ever pay close attention to All Things Nields. :-)

But the original ending of IKWKOLTI got changed into the Greta version when TN went into the studio with Kevin Moloney. So the harmony I - VI - IV - V which Nerissa now plays at the end, is the way TN *used* to play it pre-Kevin Moloney and pre-Greta --- although I've never thought that anyone other than TN were ever responsible for this change to the end of the song.

Boy what a lot of nitpicking with a finetooth comb over IKWKOLTI. But a person can live for even tiny differences like that, when one has heard TN play the same song almost nonstop for years, in '94, '95, '96, '97, '98, '99, '00, and now in '01.

© 2001