The Restless Road (Zach Beeken, Colton Pack, and Garrett Nichols) story began in 2013 when Beeken, Pack and Kane Brown, all pursuing individual musical paths, crossed paths during the third season of the television show “The X Factor.” Recognizing the chemistry between them, they decided to join forces and form Restless Road. Kane Brown refused, preferring instead to plough his own solo career. Wonder what ever happened to him?
Their harmonious blend of voices, coupled with their genuine camaraderie, immediately caught the attention of both fans and industry insiders but a few years of line up instability held the trio back until 2019 when the current line up signed a record deal with Kane Brown’s 1021 Entertainment and Sony Music Nashville, marking a significant milestone in their career. Under this new partnership, they started releasing original music, allowing their creativity to flourish and their distinct sound to reach a broader audience. Restless Road’s dedication to their craft and their commitment to creating meaningful music were evident in every song they have released since. Their performances, both live and recorded, exude passion and authenticity, drawing fans into their world and forging deep connections with their audience. This week they celebrated the release of their debut album, ‘Last Rodeo’, an album that we are huge fans of (read our review of the album right here) and we were glad to grab some time with them to talk all about it.
Thank you for taking your time to speak to me today, how are you all doing?
Zach & Colton: Great man, we are doing great!
We last spoke backstage on in Birmingham at the beginning of the year on the Kane Brown tour. You’d just got back in from going out for some Indian food.
Garrett: That was some pretty good food, for sure!
What memories were you left with from that tour and your first visit to Europe?
Zach: We absolutely loved that tour and we still talk about it all the time! We absolutely want to come back. We were blown away that our music has reached people overseas and by the fact that the crowds were so receptive to it and listened to it so well. It was cool going out after some of the shows to some bars with some of the locals too. We can’t wait to come back.
After a decade your debut album is finally here! There’s no need for you guys to be ‘restless’ any more! How are you feeling about the release?
Colton: Sleepless! (laughing)
Garrett: Yeah, we should change the name of the band now to ‘Sleepless Streets’ (laughing)
Colton: We’ve been super excited about the album coming out. It’s been a long time coming but it’s great to have a full body of work out in the world now. We put a lot of hard work into producing this album. We love that people now can see the depth of who we are now and what we want to do.
Zach: Shrek said it best. We’re kinda like an onion, we have a lot of layers and people will be able to see all those layers of us through the songs on the album.
Did you put a lot of effort into the sequencing of the album because 18 tracks is quite hard to manage the ebb and the flow of?
Zach: We did, we had some fun messing around with that. We listened to it in all sorts of different ways to try and get the flow of it right. We wanted people to go on a journey and connect the songs together.
Garrett: Yep, it’s the ‘Restless Rollercoaster!’ (laughing)
Was ‘Last Rodeo’ always going to be the title or were there other titles up for consideration too?
Zach: Going into this year I think we thought that the title was going to be ‘On My Way’ and we put out that song too but then everything changed when we wrote the song ‘Last Rodeo,’ last April. We were so fired up by that song – the sound, the message and the feel of it. It has kind of the same message as ‘On My Way’ so we put ‘Last Rodeo’ as opening track for the album and ‘On My Way’ as the last, to bookend the journey that people will go on when they listen to it. The album is all about perseverance, putting one foot in front of the other, not giving up and chasing down your dreams.
If you wrote ‘Last Rodeo’ in April, it’s still a pretty young song. What’s the oldest and youngest songs on the album?
Zach: ‘On My Way’ might well be the oldest song on there. We started working on that in 2020 right after the lockdown. We were writing all through the pandemic and ‘On My Way’ came out of that time. We have been thrilled how people have responded to that. ‘Last Rodeo’ is probably the youngest so it’s cool that those two songs probably carry the message of the album.
Someone is inevitably going to ask you about the next album. Have you been writing songs that will form the next album already?
Colton: Potentially, yeah, we have! (laughing) We’ve done our first write since finishing the album up just recently. It’s a cool spot to be in. Once you are done with a project and there’s nothing really pressing for anything else it puts you in kind of a creatively free space to be able to write whatever comes out of any given session.
Let’s dig into the writing a little. Songs like ‘Last Rodeo’ were written by Zach and Colton and then songs like ‘Roll Tide Roll’ were it’s Zach and Garrett and then there’s songs like ‘Leave Them Boots On’ which all three of you wrote. What’s the rules on bringing a song to the Restless Road table and when two of you write a banger is the other one not jealous!
Zach: We’re all cool! (laughing) There are also songs on this album that none of us wrote! At the end of the day, any song that just moves us or that we have a connection with is good. The song always wins, that’s what the legends have been saying in Country music since day one. Garth Brooks, Kenny Chesney, Tim McGraw. Blake Shelton – they all cut songs they don’t write because the songwriters here in Nashville are just that good. For one of us, two of us or all three of us to be able to write with these guys here in town is a huge honour and we don’t really worry about which of us does it. We like the flexibility of all of us writing together, somedays it would be just two of us and some days all three of us would be writing with people in three different places across town. It was divide and conquer, man! (laughing)
‘Roll Tide Roll’ might well be my favourite song on the album with the clever wordplay. Where did the inspiration for that song come from?
Zach: It all started on a beach in Mexico! We were standing on the edge of the ocean, watching the tide roll in and everybody but me was having such a great time. I realised that I was missing somebody – I’d just been through this break up. We went to dinner that night and our waiter, who was Mexican, heard that Garrett was from Alabama and he kept going ‘Roll Tide!’ and I couldn’t get the link between where we were, my situation and the ‘Roll Tide Roll’ line out of my head. I knew the idea was kinda crazy but those sort of things are always the ideas you have to pay attention to. Cringe, crazy and success all live kinda right around the same neighbourhood!
My favourite part of the album is the double-whammy pairing of ’10 Things’ and ‘Leave Them Boots On’. It kinda feels like the same story in two parts, it could be the same girl, even. Did you pair them together intentionally for that reason?
Zach: Dude! That’s my favourite part of the album as well. Tracks 10 through 14, that’s my favourite chunk.
Colton: ’10 Things’ was very purposefully included where it is because Zach had this dream about putting ’10 Things’ at track 10 on the album. Throughout the album, we did try to pair up specific sounds or stories together so that the listener is in a particular zone for a number of songs at a time. ‘Leave Them Boots On’ was the very last song that we wrote for this album. It was such an infectious song and something that had a sound, that kind of ‘train beat’ sound, that we hadn’t ever written before. It’s quite a dark song and it feels very ‘western’ sounding too, which we love.
‘Leave Them Boots On’ would also be a good radio song following on from the title track too.
Zach: You know what’s crazy? The day we wrote ‘Last Rodeo’ Colton also brought up the song title ‘Leave Them Boots On.’ We wrote ‘Last Rodeo’ that day and then maybe about three weeks later we circled back to the ‘Leave Them Boots On’ idea and realised that both songs fitted the sort of ‘lonesome cowboy’ theme with a western tinge and we didn’t really have any other songs that sounded like that.
Colton: The song was inspired by imagining what the male perspective of Shania Twain’s ‘Whose Bed Have Your Boots Been Under’ might have been. The guy is saying that he wishes someone would have told him not to put his boots under her bed, right, and the consequences that came because of it.
Tell me about ‘Most Nights’ and Erin Kinsey’s role on that song?
Garrett: You know what, that song might well be the oldest song on the album now that I think about it?
Colton: We’ve had that song for a long time. We knew we wanted to do a duet on the album but we wanted to be very specific about who it should be with. Erin is an unbelievable vocalist. She’s one of the people here in town that is really on the way up right now – she was perfect for this song and she didn’t hesitate when we sent it to her, in fact, she said she would love to before she’d even heard it! (laughing) Her vocals on that song take it to a whole new level and we’re honoured to have her on it.
You guys are going to have such a headache working out which songs to send to radio from this album.
Colton: That would be a good problem to have.
When you play live to you prefer to sing big ballads like ‘You Don’t Have to Love Me’ or party songs like ‘No Can Do?’
Colton: When we go to concerts ourselves we love to have a great time, no matter what artist it is. I love a concert that is super-energetic, right? So, we try and make sure, most of the time, that our shows lean that way too.
Zach: If you structure a show that way you can pick out one or two really big ballads and make them special. You get the time and space to hit them with a hammer love song or an ‘On My Way’ type of song. It’s much better that way than having a show full of just slow stuff.
Colton: It’s been really easy to put a setlist together up to the point of the album coming out because we only had about 10 songs out there. After the album comes out it will be much harder to do because there will be an influx of songs out there that people, hopefully, will want to hear. There’s only so much time each night so it will be interesting to see which ones end up in the set.
Tell me how ‘Growing Old With You’ make it from the pen of Lady A’s Charles Kelley to you?
Garrett: We just cornered him in a room and said, ‘listen here, man, write a song for us!’ (laughing) In reality, we heard that song and we immediately fell in love with it. We went on the tv show, The Batchelor, with that, the timing was great. It’s a timeless, beautiful song that felt so good to put out. We’re all in different places in our life but we all ‘love’ love.
Zach: It was a song that was circulating around town at the time and I don’t know who else had heard it before us but when we heard it we jumped on it right away. I don’t understand why anybody would pass on it!
Colton: It’s a song that is almost too perfect! After we cut it, we talked to Charles about it and he said that if we didn’t go to radio with it, he would cut it again and take it to radio! (laughing) That song really changed our lives and our careers so we couldn’t be more grateful to him and we’ve developed a strong relationship with Charles and Lady A because of it. He came out with us to the Opry one night and sang it with us too.
Check out our review of ‘Last Rodeo’ by Restless Road right here
