During his Monday (9.01,) interview for Dax Shepard’s Armchair Expert podcast, Jason Aldean recalled his emotional breakdown months after witnessing the 2017 Las Vegas shooting.
It was while performing at the Route 91 Harvest festival in October 2017, that the superstar country music had just begun playing when a gunman started firing into the crowd from the 32nd floor of a nearby hotel.
While Aldean and his band managed to escape the stage unharmed, 60 people died and 800+ others were injured during the tragic incident.
Reflecting on how he didn’t process the “horrible ordeal” at the time because he’d previously agreed to perform on Saturday Night Live the weekend after the incident, the now 48-year old singer/songwriter said:
“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.” “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.”
Stating that he didn’t begin to think about the tragic shooting until after his wife Brittany Aldean gave birth to their son Memphis in December of 2017, Aldean added:
“I think for me, you know, I kind of had a breakdown in my house one day.” “It was after my son was born and just all that heaviness of everything, just getting laid on you… For our little family, our little crew, we got so lucky, not one injury to any of our guys. And you’re happy about that, but then there’s like this guilt-ridden thing. It sucks.”
When asked by Dax, the show’s co-host, whether he had sought out therapy, Jason admitted that he hadn’t yet, stating:
“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.”
Noting that the West Coast incident means he’ll forever be connected to Las Vegas, the Georgia-born musician said “At some point you can either kind of run from it or accept it and try and make something good out of it.” “And that’s kind of what we tried to do.”
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Author: Saul Goode
Photo: Gage Skidmore from Surprise, AZ, United States of America