Jason Aldean Details His ‘Breakdown’ Months After the Las Vegas Route 91 Festival Shooting

Nearly eight years after the deadly shooting at the Route 91 Harvest Festival in Las Vegas, Jason Aldean is opening up about how the event affected him.

Aldean, 48, was performing on stage when the shooting occurred, which killed 60 people and injured more than 800 on Oct. 1, 2017.

“It was a festival like we’ve done a million times,” Aldean said on the Monday, Sept. 1 episode of the Armchair Expert podcast. “It was just obviously something that we weren’t prepared for.”

The “Try That in a Small Town” singer talked about his busy schedule after the shooting, including reuniting with family and performing on Saturday Night Live just days later.

“We finally got out of there the next afternoon, home, and you’re just glad to be home. My mom’s crying,” Aldean said. “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.”

After his SNL performance, Aldean kept moving, visiting victims in the hospital.

“Sunday morning, I was on a flight going back to Las Vegas to go to the hospital and see all the victims. That was tough,” he said. “People hadn’t recovered from their wounds yet.”

Following these appearances, Aldean finished his tour, which lasted another month. Then his and wife Brittany’s son Memphis was born two months after the shooting, giving Aldean time at home to focus on family and process everything he had been through.

“All of a sudden at home, we had something else to focus on instead of watching that on the news every day,” he said. “For me, 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.”

Aldean said his emotions came from thinking about all the “could have been” situations after the shooting.

“I ended up having a moment at my house where I 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. My wife was eight months pregnant with my son, and all these things,” he explained.

The country singer admitted he struggled to understand his emotions during that time.

“It’s easier to talk about now. At the time it wasn’t because you’re still trying to comprehend what had just happened,” he said. “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—no one in our crew was injured. You’re happy about that, but then you feel guilty for being happy. There’s like this guilt-ridden thing.”

When asked by podcast host Dax Shepard if he went to therapy for the incident, Aldean replied, “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 there. We all talked about it amongst each other.”

Aldean said the incident will “forever connect us to that city,” adding, “At some point, you can either run from it or accept it and try to make something good out of it. And that’s what we tried to do.”

Looking ahead, Aldean hopes to return to Vegas for an extended period.

“I think that’s probably in our future—to hit Vegas, do some residencies—but for me to just stop touring and even doing it the way we do it,” he shared. “This is what I’ve wanted to do from the time I can remember.”