Zach Beeken, Colton Pack and Garrett Nichols of Restless Road have come a long way to be where they are now, which is signed to Kane Brown’s record label, promoting a new EP and single, and earning an opening slot on Brown’s Worldwide Beautiful Tour. All these accomplishments didn’t come fast though — they’ve been many years in the making.

Restless Road first got their start on singing competition show, The X Factor, in 2013. Band members Beeken and Pack were both individual contestants on the show, which is where they originally met Brown, who was also a contestant. Following the show, Beeken, Pack and original member Andrew Scholz, moved to Nashville to pursue their dream. Nichols eventually joined the band in Scholz’s place, and they secured a record deal, but it didn’t quite pan out like they thought it would.

“We had been writing songs everyday, we’d written hundreds of songs, and we really never got the opportunity to put out music, so we decided to leave our record label and kind of call it off for a little bit,” says Beeken in an exclusive interview with Sounds Like Nashville. “I think we all kind of felt like we wanted to take a break and collect ourselves and ask ourselves, ‘What do we really want to do with our lives?’ It was definitely still music. We had to go get jobs at restaurants and the bars, I know Colton was, at the time, raising a family doing construction in West Virginia.”

Then, with one text message, their worlds completely changed. That message was from Brown, their former X Factor friend turned full-blown country music star. Brown contacted Pack after seeing a cover video of him singing Brown’s “Good As You.” This led to the band scoring a record deal with Brown and releasing their self-titled EP.