Jason Aldean is forever changed by the 2017 Las Vegas music fest massacre.
The country singer, 48, appeared on Monday’s episode of Dax Shepard’s “Armchair Expert” podcast and reflected on the Route 91 Harvest Festival shooting, where a gunman opened fire in the crowd on the Las Vegas strip while Aldean was performing on stage.
Sixty people were killed and over 800 others were injured in the Oct. 1, 2017 incident.
“It was a festival like we’ve done a million times,” Aldean said on the podcast. “It was just obviously something that we weren’t prepared for.”
“Obviously, it was a horrible ordeal,” the singer continued. “We finally got out of there the next afternoon, home and you’re just glad to be home, show up, my mom’s crying. You know, my oldest daughter was in school, freaking out, thinking that somebody was trying to shoot us, so all the details were still kind of coming out.”
Aldean noted that he barely had time to process the shooting because of his busy schedule, which involved doing more shows on his tour and performing on “Saturday Night Live” the weekend after the incident.
“Obviously, ‘Saturday Night Live’ is something I’ve always wanted to play. It’s like one of those things as an artist. It’s an iconic show,” Aldean explained. “I hated that it was like that. Part of me was like, ‘F–k, I don’t wanna do it like that.’ And we were shellshocked too.”
Aldean performed in the cold opening on the NBC show on Oct. 7, 2017. The next day, he flew back to Las Vegas to visit the injured victims at the hospital.
“That was tough to go in and see,” he admitted. “People hadn’t recovered from their wounds yet. It was pretty crazy. We had a week after that, we were right back on tour going to play.”
The “Big Green Tractor” star’s son Memphis, 7, was born exactly two months after the shooting, which gave the family “something else to focus on versus watching that on the news every day.”
“I think for me, you know, I kind of had a breakdown in my house one day,” Aldean shared. “It was after my son was born and just all that heaviness of everything, just getting laid on you.”
“It’s easier to talk about now,” he continued. “At the time it wasn’t because you’re still trying to comprehend what had just happened. You know, my bass player, my best friend for the last 25 years, his bass had a bullet lodged in it that he was wearing when we were on stage.”
“For our little family, our little crew, we got so lucky, not one injury to any of our guys,” Aldean said. “And you’re happy about that, but then there’s like this guilt ridden thing. It sucks.”
Describing his breakdown, Aldean said, “I ended up having a moment at my house where I kind of broke down thinking about all the people that I could have lost, all the people that we did lose as far as fans, but my inner circle of people and my wife was there eight months pregnant with my son and all these things.”
When asked by Shepard, 50, if he went to therapy after the shooting, Aldean responded, “I guess [I’m] too Southern. Here’s the ironic thing. We funded a ton of therapy for all the crews and everybody else. My therapy was me, my wife, my band, all of us that were kind of there. We all talked about it amongst each other.”
Aldean also said that the incident will “forever connect” him to Las Vegas.
“At some point you can either kind of run from it or accept it and try and make something good out of it,” he shared. “And that’s kind of what we tried to do.”
