Under The Table And Above The Sun (20th Anniversary Edition) Reckless Kelly

• 1 Let's Just Fall (Remastered) 02:57
• 2 Nobody's Girl (Remastered) 03:03
• 3 Desolation Angels (Remastered) 05:10
• 4 Everybody (Remastered) 03:59
• 5 I Saw It Coming (Remastered) 03:09
• 6 Vancouver (Remastered) 04:00
• 7 Willamina (Remastered) 04:03
• 8 Mersey Beat (Remastered) 03:40
• 9 Set Me Free (Remastered) 04:25
• 10 Snowfall (Remastered) 03:20
• 11 You Don't Want Me Around (Remastered) 02:31
• 12 May Peace Find You Tonight (Remastered) 03:59
• Total Runtime 44:16

Info for Under The Table And Above The Sun (20th Anniversary Edition)

20th anniversary edition: The band’s third studio album included the fan favorites ‘Nobody’s Girl’ and ‘Vancouver.’

Reckless Kelly was formed by brothers and central Idaho natives Willy and Cody Braun in 1996, who came from strong musical stock. Their grandfather Eustaceus “Mustie” Braun was a keyboard player who made his name on the casino circuit of the 1950s in Nevada and Idaho. His sons Muzzie, Gary, and Billy went on to form the Braun Brothers, and Muzzie handed down his love of music to his sons, Willy, Cody, Gary, and Micky.

Muzzie Braun & the Little Braun Brothers (later Muzzie Braun & the Boys) performed twice on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson and shared the stage with Glen Campbell, Johnny Cash, and Merle Haggard, among others. Vocalist and guitarist Willy and Cody (vocals, fiddle, mandolin, harmonica) then chased their own musical dreams to Austin, TX, naming their group after the Australian outlaw Ned Kelly, with drummer Jay Nazz, bassist Chris Schelske, and guitarist Casey Pollock, who was later replaced by David Abeyta.

The group’s smart mix of country, pop, roots, and rock gave them a profile around Austin, as well as the endorsement of big influences and local and national heroes such as Robert Earl Keen, who became their first manager, and Joe Ely. They made their album debut with 1998’s Millican, following it with 2000’s The Day and a live album. After signing with the notable Americana label Sugar Hill Records, they convened in a Tennessee studio in December 2002 to make their their third album with producer and hit singer-songwriter, Ray Kennedy (Steve Earle, Lucinda Williams).

The album’s 12 original songs were a showcase for the breadth of Reckless Kelly’s talents through 12 original songs, going from reflective, mid-tempo balladry (“Vancouver,” “Everybody,” “Desolation Angels”) via foot-stomping rockers (“Nobody’s Girl,” “Mersey Beat”) to the hook-laden, pop-oriented “Let’s Just Fall” and “I Saw It Coming.”

Reviewers lined up to praise the set, with the Austin Chronicle hailing the band’s “mature and serious” songwriting, while No Depression wrote: “It’s just good country rock without schlock and gloss.” Under the Table & Above the Sun made Billboard’s Top Country Albums Chart and opened the door to a sequence of successful subsequent releases.

Recalls Willy Braun: “It was our first album with David Abeyta on lead guitar, first record for the Sugar Hill, and first collaboration with producer Ray Kennedy, who encouraged me to write at least twice as many songs as we needed. The songs were better; the band was tighter. It was our first ‘grown-up’ record. This album felt like we had learned who we were as a band. Looking back, after twenty years, there’s not much I would change about this album, and I hope it holds up in the eyes and ears of the fans as much as it does for the band and myself. I hope we all still feel the same in another twenty years.”

Reckless Kelly have released seven further studio albums since, including Wicked Twisted Road (2005), Bulletproof (2008), and the Grammy-winning Long Night Moon (2013), as well as the popular 2006 live CD/DVD, Reckless Kelly Was Here. Their latest album American Jackpot/American Girls came out in 2020, and in addition to their regular touring across the US, fans can catch Reckless Kelly at their annual Braun Brothers Reunion festival in Challis, Idaho, this year set for August 8-10.

"While Under the Table & Above the Sun isn’t groundbreaking enough to save the future of music, it is a fine album, nonetheless, living up to the hype within Keen’s lavish words of praise. Throughout the outing, the group, led by brothers Cody and Willy Braun, incorporates a vast array of sounds — banjo, bouzouki, sitar, dobro, piano, and a variety of guitars, mandolins, and percussion instruments — to form an intriguing sonic landscape. The lyrics are first-rate musings on life, love, outlaws, girlfriends, and The Beatles, and the melodies are infectious enough to draw in the listener, but not so contagious as to wear out their welcome all that quickly — if at all.

Ironically, Under the Table & Above the Sun’s biggest downfall, however, is also what makes it such an enjoyable suite of songs. It’s not entirely original, but its pilfered atmospheres are replicated perfectly under the guiding hand of Ray Kennedy, who, of course, is one-half of the twangtrust — the production duo whose other half is none other than Steve Earle. Indeed, if imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then Earle ought to be mighty pleased. Reckless Kelly does such a terrific job at appropriating his style that those not privy to knowing the name of the group that recorded the album might think it’s some long lost outing from Earle’s days as a country renegade. That’s not a bad thing either, and Under the Table & Above the Sun clearly demonstrates without a doubt that Reckless Kelly is a band to watch because it will go far. In the meantime, sit back and enjoy because alt-country doesn’t get much better than this." (John Metzger, The Music Box)

Reckless Kelly

Produced by Ray Kennedy

Digitally remastered

Please Note: We offer this album in its native sampling rate of 96 kHz, 24-bit. The provided 192 kHz version was up-sampled and offers no audible value!

Reckless Kelly
Understanding the virtuosity of Reckless Kelly requires the perspective of where the band has been. Cody and Willy Braun grew up in the White Cloud Mountains of Idaho. They moved to Bend, Oregon, and then migrated to that great musical fountainhead, Austin, Texas.

The band’s co-founders and frontmen toured the country as part of their father’s band, Muzzie Braun and the Boys, as children. They performed on The Tonight Show twice. Their father taught his four sons a professional ethic – integrity, persistence, hard work and professionalism – honed over three generations. They overcame hardships, struggled for recognition, and learned the lessons of the trial and error that defined them.

In one sense, it’s remarkable in the way of any musician, athlete, or businessperson who bucks the odds. In another, though, it’s utterly natural that Reckless Kelly, born in the dreams of the two Braun brothers and their heritage but nurtured in the bumpy road of maturity, became the very essence of Americana music in all its far-flung glory.

“We came along in that second wave of the movement,” Cody Braun says. “Son Volt’s album Trace had a major effect on us. People like Joe Ely, Ray Kennedy and Robert Earl Keen were always big supporters. Our goal was to make music that had a country vibe but a solid rock edge.”

In the end, all the recipe required was to just add water. Water facilitates life. It enriches the soul. As Music Row magazine proclaimed, “In my perfect world, this is what country radio would sound like.”

“This” is Reckless Kelly.

The heartland gave the band authenticity. Musical lives honed its skill. Adversity instilled its persistence. Moving to Austin gave it wings to fly.

As kids, the Brauns – Cody, Willy, Micky and Gary – shared a stage with the likes of Johnny Cash, Glen Campbell and Merle Haggard. Micky and Gary Braun now helm their own band, Micky and the Motorcars. In Bend, Cody and Willy added drummer Jay Nazz, who brought with him his own unique experience.

“I had grown up in the Northeast, performing at clubs and weddings with my dad and brother from the age of 13,” Nazz recalls, “so, when I met Willy and Cody, we already had that in common. Both of our dads were musicians with a very similar kind of performing discipline. That helped us bond immediately.”

The band took its name from the legend of Ned Kelly, the Australian highwayman, and the three moved to Austin in the autumn of 1996, where they carved a niche of their own. Early on, Keen, a Texas legend himself, took them under his wing and became their first manager. They listened, watched and interacted with the creative dynamos of the outlaw country scene – Townes Van Zandt, Steve Earle, Billy Joe Shaver, Guy Clark and others – and joined them in a redefinition of what contemporary country music had become. Theirs was gritty, hard-edged, uncompromising and convincing. They turned country music real again.

Willy Braun wrote half the songs of Millican, 1998’s self-released debut, in an abandoned school bus, where he had lived for six months in Bend. The effect of that album was to emblazon Reckless Kelly with a reputation as a band of no-nonsense insurgents that could raise the rafters while still retaining a heart and soul of honesty, soul and conviction.

They evolved, adding David Abetya, a graduate of the Berklee School of Music, on lead guitar in 2000. Kansas-bred bassist Joe Miller — who had grown up on a family farm before becoming a broadcaster at his college radio station and migrating to Austin – signed on 2012.

Reckless Kelly’s string of critically acclaimed albums – Under the Table and Above the Sun (2003), Wicked Twisted Road (2005), Bulletproof (2008), Somewhere in Time (2010), Grammy-nominated Good Luck & True Love (2011) and Grammy-winning Long Night Moon (2013) – set a standard of reliable excellence and commitment to an instinctive vision of Americana. No band exemplifies the broad genre better.

Independent? Oh, yeah. Doggedly so. Nothing demonstrates it more than the band’s path through a succession of prestigious record labels – Sugar Hill and Yep Roc, among them – en route to a label, No Big Deal, of their own.

For two decades, the band has toured coast to coast relentlessly. It has demonstrated its longevity in a world where trendy newcomers are proclaimed the Next Big Thing by spinning a couple pop hits. They disappear from the radar, doomed by the very fad that invented them. Not unlike the pioneers who preceded them on the western frontier where the Brauns were raised, they have forged their survival without compromise, combining hard work with a resolve that success is only satisfying when achieved by their own standards and definition.

The group’s most recent studio album, Sunset Motel, is, like all its predecessors, distinctive in its own way while true to form. Self-produced and recorded in Austin’s renowned Arlyn Studios (where Millican was made two decades ago) and mixed by Jim Scott (Rolling Stones, Dixie Chicks, Tom Petty, Sting, Roger Daltrey, Crowded House, et al.), it reflects Reckless Kelly’s attention to craft and continuity.

Twenty years since its founding, Reckless Kelly continues to fight for wider recognition, secure in the knowledge that fans, critics and contemporaries will continue to sing its praises.

The songs hit one emotional peak after another: the infectious “Volcano,” the urgent “One More One Last Time,” the desperate desire that comes full circle in “How Can You Love Him (You Don’t Even Like Him)” and the bittersweet title track. With steady guitar drive and a series of insistent choruses, they all ring with power and conviction that make Sunset Motel a breathtaking listening experience.

“Willy wrote 30 or 40 songs for the new album and we cut about half of them,” Cody says. “We ended up using 13 of them, but there were still some good ones left on the cutting-room floor.”

Cody, Willy and Nazz have been constants since the beginning. Abeyta and Miller add their own wrinkles to a signature sound that remains intact. The populist following grows, but the band has also moved on to play in performing arts centers and listening rooms that provide more focused encounters.

“We’re at the point where we’re not content to be categorized as simply a party band anymore,” Willy says. “We would like folks to really hear these songs, to be able to hear the lyrics and appreciate the musicianship that goes into the arrangements. Yes, we still want our audiences to have a good time, but we also want to show that this is a real band with a cohesive attitude and a muscular backbone, as well. We don’t want to be pigeonholed as simply a Texas-based, beer-drinking, rowdy bunch of party boys. There’s a lot more to it than that.”

“This is a really good place to be,” Cody adds. “We’ve built a solid fan base, which gives us a nice safety net. At the same time, we can take things at a more leisurely pace because we can control our own destiny.”

Great bands know good music. They make it the way they like, confident that what they love, what excites them, will also gain traction with thousands and thousands, perhaps even millions, of passionate fans.

Reckless Kelly is, by the best possible definition, a great band.

Freedom to pursue its own destiny has always been at the center of the band’s ambitions. Their fate is as much in their own hands as is reasonably possible.

“We’ve toured extensively over the course of our career,” Cody says. “We’ve traveled front and back, up and down, across this country. Happily, we’re at a point where we’re not killing ourselves to pay the bills.”

That point liberates them to be true to their background, their heritage and, most importantly, themselves.

“We’ve always been hands-on in terms of our marketing and our delivery,” Willy says. “The labels always gave us the freedom we asked for, but an A&R person doesn’t always know what’s best for the band.”

The fierce self-reliance and independent spirit keeps Reckless Kelly happy, appreciative and charitable. Their annual festival, The Braun Brothers Reunion, in Challis, Idaho, has been ongoing for 37 years now. They reunite with their brothers, Gary and Micky (and the Motorcars). The Brauns run it without major sponsors or outside promoters.

The band also hosts the yearly Reckless Kelly Celebrity Softball Jam to raise money for Austin-area youth charities, putting $300,000 in those coffers over the past seven years.

“It’s a great way to give back,” Cody says. “It’s great to be able to share our success in such a positive way.”

Collectively, they’ve played over 3,000 shows and traveled over 1,500,000 miles to 49 states.

Reckless Kelly is a great band with an apt name. The outlaw’s spirit pervades the ambiance. They are rugged individualists who dedicate themselves to advancing the state of their art.

They’re good guys, too. Their hearts dwell in the right places, and those are where the music follows.

This album contains no booklet.