Recently, country star Jason Aldean sat down with Today's Willie Geist to discuss his beginnings in country music, his current tour and the concert that still haunts him - the 2017 Route 91 Harvest Festival where 59 people were killed and many more were injured in the deadliest mass shooting in modern American history.
Aldean was on stage that fateful Sunday night when a shooter perched in a room at the Mandalay Bay hotel took aim at country music festival goers below on the Las Vegas Strip. After realizing that the outdoor venue was in a state of emergency, Aldean rushed off of the stage to find his pregnant wife Brittany backstage.
"When somebody buys a ticket to our show or comes into an arena to watch you play, we want them to come, have fun, get home safe, and come see us the next time we're in town," Aldean told Today. "The last thing we're thinking is they're going to show up and never leave."
While Aldean has visited victims several times and plans to play the iHeartRadio Music Festival at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas next month, the shooting still weighs heavily on him, and he doesn't feel comfortable knowing that such an awful act will forever be associated with him. "That's not something I want on my resume for the rest of my life. For me, it's something not that I want to forget, but it's something that I choose to not relive over and over," he said in the interview.
Read More: Jason Aldean Makes Surprise Visit to a Route 91 Survivor
Today.com adds that Aldean also expressed how he felt shortly after the incident. "I think in the weeks that followed that ... it was a lot of different emotions going on for me and, you know, guilt, anger and a lot of other things," he explained. "I know in my heart that it's not my fault that that happened, but it still doesn't keep you from feeling a little guilty that, you know, people were there for you."
But Aldean's interview didn't only consist of talk about the Las Vegas shooting. As seen in the video above, the relatively short clip covered quite a bit of ground including Aldean's rise to fame as a country singer and how he almost left Nashville before securing his life-changing record deal with Broken Bow. Geist also asked Aldean about his new Nashville restaurant and his recent sold-out show at Madison Square Garden in New York City.
ACM's Entertainer of the Year, Jason Aldean, is currently on tour supporting his latest No. 1 album, Rearview Town on the High Noon Neon tour with Luke Combs and Lauren Alaina.
