Jason Aldean Details His Emotional Breakdown Following Las Vegas Route 91 Festival Shooting
on Sep 01, 2025
The Route 91 Festival Claims The Lives Of 60 People
Country superstar Jason Aldean has been impacted forever by the deadly shooting that occurred at the 2017 Route 91 Harvest festival in Las Vegas.
While Aldean was performing on stage, a gunman setup in a room on the 32nd floor of a major hotel opened fire on the crowd.
Sixty people were killed and over 800 others were injured during the incident.
Jason Aldean Opens Up About The Impact Route 91 Festival Had On His Own Life
The country singer appeared on Monday’s (September 1) episode of Dax Shepard’s “Armchair Expert” podcast, where he discussed the mental toll the experience had on his life.
“It was a festival like we’ve done a million times,” Aldean said on the podcast. “It was just obviously something that we weren’t prepared for.”
Aldean shared how his entire family was shaken up following the tragedy.
“Obviously, it was a horrible ordeal,” the singer continued. “We finally got out of there the next afternoon, home and you’re just glad to be home, show up, my mom’s crying. You know, 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.”
The “Big Green Tractor” singer performed the following weekend on Saturday Night Live, and then went back to Las Vegas to visit the injured victims at the hospital.
“That was tough to go in and see,” he shared. “People hadn’t recovered from their wounds yet. It was pretty crazy. We had a week after that, we were right back on tour going to play.”
Despite moving forward in life, Aldean says eventually he had a “breakdown” a few months following the tragedy, thinking about the magnitude of the heartbreak.
“For our little family, our little crew, we got so lucky, not one injury to any of our guys,” Aldean said. “And you’re happy about that, but then there’s like this guilt ridden thing. It sucks. I ended up having a moment at my house where I kind of 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 and my wife was there eight months pregnant with my son and all these things.”
The singer shared that he will always hold Las Vegas close to him, saying the incident will “forever connect us to that city,” adding, “At some point you can either run from it or accept it and try and make something good out of it. And that’s what we tried to do.”
“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.”
Watch Jason Aldean on “Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard” below.
