13 December 2019
Newsdesk
Jason Aldean scaled down his return to Las Vegas because he wanted fans who survived the Route 91 Harvest Festival massacre to feel safe at the gig.
The country superstar was onstage when a gunman opened fire on the crowd at the festival in 2017, and he only recently returned to the city for the first time since the tragedy.
Aldean explains he hand-picked the Park MGM venue for the show, because he felt fans who were caught up in the tragedy would feel safe there.
"For us, going back to Vegas was something we wanted to do the right way," he told Kelly Clarkson during an appearance on her daytime show on Thursday (12Dec19).
"We felt like there was going to be a lot of people at our show that probably hadn’t been to one of our shows, maybe hadn’t been to a concert at all since that show. If they were going to come back out and that was part of the healing process for them.
"We wanted to make it a safer environment, something to make them feel safer. We did Park MGM, a little 5,000-seat arena. The other one was outside, 30,000 or 40,000 people or whatever it was. This was a little smaller, little more intimate, where people can come and, hopefully, feel a little more at ease..."
Aldean admitted he, his wife, bandmates and crew provided support to each other in the weeks after the Route 91 shootings.
"We had to get onstage the next week and try to get through all of it," he added. "It was rough. The best thing for me was the fact that my wife was there and went through it, my band was there and went through it, my crew, everybody. We kind of leaned on each other and talked through it. Nobody kept it bottled up.
"If you had a breakdown, you kind of had it in front of everybody and everybody knew what was going on."
