The country singer said the birth of his son has helped him move on after the Route 91 Harvest Festival shooting. The birth of his son helped Jason Aldean begin his recovery after surviving the deadly shooting in Las Vegas.
Aldean opened up about the incident, his newborn son and how close he and his bandmates became casualties on Thursday in an interview with SiriusXM in Nashville .
“I definitely took some time to think about it and needed some time off, you know, to get away from it for a little bit and go home,” Aldean said in the interview. “And one of the things that helped me personally was the birth of my son. That gave me the opportunity to focus on other things.”
Aldean was performing on stage on October 1, 2017, at the Route 91 Harvest Festival when a man at a nearby hotel opened fire, 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁ing 58 people and injuring more than 500. He said he thought a speaker was exploding when he first heard gunshots, until his bandmates started hiding and security came to evict them. Go.
During the interview, Aldean also revealed that a bullet actually hit the bass guitar that band member Tully Kennedy was playing at the time.
“My bass player opened up the bass he was playing that night and there was a bullet in his bass,” he recalls. “People…sometimes they’ll ask me like, ‘Wow, how close are you really to it?’ And I said, ‘Oh, it’s close.’ I mean, you know, the bass player standing to my left has a bullet in his guitar.”
Aldean speculates that if Kennedy hadn’t played such a thick, heavy guitar, “it probably would have gone straight into his gut.”
He reflected that the last few months have been a whirlwind, but he’s committed to continuing playing for his fans.
“Within a couple months man, I saw the worst thing you could poss experience and I saw the best thing you could possibly experience, with him being born,” Aldean said. “So it kind of gave me something else to focus on and gave me a reason to look forward to the new year and sort of getting a chance to get back out there and do what it is that I love to do.”
