NASHVILLE, Tenn. — In the aftermath of the massacre at the Route 91 Harvest festival in October 2017, country star Jason Aldean — who was performing when the gunman started shooting — vividly remembers when he first started to emotionally recover from the horrific tragedy.
It was almost a week after the nightmare in Las Vegas, when 58 people were killed and more than 500 were injured in the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history. Aldean and his band members escaped to safety, but in the following days, they struggled with trauma and survivors’ guilt. The next weekend, Aldean was invited to be on “Saturday Night Live,” where he sang Tom Petty’s “I Won’t Back Down” as a tribute to the victims. Being back onstage and seeing the positive response to the performance helped the whole band process grief.
“The reaction we got from that show sort of changed the way we looked at a lot of that stuff,” Aldean said Friday at Country Radio Seminar in Nashville, an annual industry event for radio programmers. “It made us realize that there are still way more good people out in the world than there are bad, than this one guy who had done this insanely disgusting thing. … It was a really healing thing for all of us.”
Aldean appeared at CRS for a moderated panel called “Overcoming Obstacles,” which looked at various challenges over the course of his 20-year country music career. But the crowd appeared most curious about how he handled the aftermath of Las Vegas. During a brief audience Q&A, one attendee offered a caveat that the question might be “too personal” but asked anyway whether Aldean sought therapy after the shooting.