“I’m literally cleaning toilets by day, driving a van overnight to play a show,” Carly Pearce recounts on this week’s Soul Sisters podcast.

The road to her current success was nine years long, she explained recently, starting at the age of 16, with when she convinced her parents to let her leave high school, move to Nashville, and take a job at Dollywood so she could pursue her dream of making music.

Along the way, she took any odd job she could get to pay her bills.

Listen to the full episode below — in which Pearce talks more about making the Every Little Thing album, and touring with the likes of Blake Shelton and Thomas Rhett.