Jason Aldean sat down for a new interview with Tucker Carlson and talked about the 2017 shooting that left 58 people dead and more than 800 injured.
It’s been almost seven years since a gunman opened fire during Jason Aldean’s set at the Route 91 Harvest Festival in Las Vegas. In a new interview with Tucker Carlson, the “Dirt Road Anthem” singer opened up about the terrifying experience and shared how it changed him.
Carlson broached the subject with Aldean by saying, “You were performing in Las Vegas during the biggest mass shooting in American history. I didn’t know until today … your bus got shot up.”
Jason, who was the headlining act for the 3-day festival’s final night, responded by saying that there are many details about his experience that day that people don’t know. He added that it was “a scary time” before recalling terrifying details about what he and his band and crew went through as they watched events unfold.
“I went out to play a show like I always do. You expect to go out there for an hour and a half, two hours, get done, come back, and hang out with your guys, get on the plane, bus, whatever it is, and go home,” Jason said. “That night it was just a different story. It was something that a lot of guys in my camp, my crew, it kind of messed a lot of people up for a while.”
Jason, who has always focused on the victims when speaking about the shooting, told Tucker that one of the hardest things for him to deal with was not having answers.
“The toughest part was going through all that and then you get home and you’re watching the news trying to figure out, why did this guy do this? What was his reasoning? Why this show? And you never really got any answers about any of that stuff. Still, to this day, we don’t really know much about it,” Jason said before sharing how close he and his band members were to being injured.
“You just go and see the aftermath after it happened. There’s bullet holes in the front of my bus and the side of my band bus. The windows got shot out of the band bus. My bass player, who was on stage, one of my best friends for 25 years, and was standing next to me, had a bullet lodged in the bass he was playing at the time.”
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Jason said that he and his band returned home, but had to leave all of their gear on the stage in Las Vegas for the duration of the FBI investigation. Upon arriving home, Saturday Night Live producer Lorne Michaels called Aldean and invited him to perform and deliver a cold opening during that week’s show. Jason told Michaels that he would do it on one condition – That he could say what he wanted to say without a script or being censored.
“I said, ‘I got some stuff to say. If you’ll let me do … I don’t want you guys writing stuff for me to talk about or say. Let me write it, say what I want to say,'” Jason recalled telling Lorne, adding that he also wanted to honor one of his own heroes, Tom Petty, during the SNL opening. “‘Just let me say what I want to say and play a song for [Tom] Petty.’ Lorne told me that was fine and I could do what I wanted.”
Jason Aldean speaks about Las Vegas and does a stunning version of Tom Petty’s “Won’t Back Down” during #SNL‘s cold open.#SundayMorning pic.twitter.com/ITectO8lug
— Holly Figueroa O’Reilly (@AynRandPaulRyan) October 8, 2017
Jason shared the first words he said after realizing there was an active shooter.
Jason Aldean was mid-set when a gunman opened fire. The singer told Tucker Carlson that he didn’t have any idea what was going on, and assumed the noise he was hearing was due to a blown speaker. He said that he didn’t realize what was happening until he got off stage and removed his ear monitors.
“I can’t really hear anything but my band. I just kind of heard something that sounded like it was cracking, but it was the gun going off. It was coming through the microphones, and it just sounded weird. But I didn’t know what it was,” Aldean said.
As soon as he took his ear monitors out and realized what was happening, the first words he said were, “Where’s Britt?”
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Jason’s wife, Brittany, had accompanied him to the Vegas concert and was 8 months pregnant with their son, Memphis. Jason’s bandmate helped locate Brittany and bring her to Jason. Together, they “hunkered down,” waiting for an opportunity to run to the safety of the bus.
“I kept noticing the guy would shoot then there’d be a little break where I guess he would go to a different window, or whatever he was doing.” Jason instructed his wife to start running as soon as there was another break in the shooting.
“We got about halfway there then he started shooting again. She kind of froze up and I grabbed her and took her to the bus, got in the back of the bus,” Aldean recalled.
The singer said that he thought the shooter was backstage “mowing people down,” and learned details about the shooting in real-time watching the news while hiding on his bus.
Jason Aldean and his band returned to the stage to finish their tour after the shooting.
Despite being shaken by the events of the Route 91 Harvest Festival shooting, Jason Aldean and his crew returned to the road to finish up the last 6 weeks of his tour. Aldean called the experience of being back on stage, sometimes in wide open amphitheaters, “unnerving.”
Aldean still struggles with the fact that he and others affected by the events never got questions answered and never got closure.
“You’re trying to figure out, was I supposed to be the target of this thing? Was this an act of some guy just being evil and just wanting to do damage to whoever? You don’t really know what’s going on.”
He added that he expected to get answers after the investigation concluded, but to this day has never heard from the FBI, and only knows “what everybody else knows from the news.”
Watch Jason Aldean talk to Tucker Carlson about the Route 91 Harvest Festival tragedy in the video below.