Jason Aldean has recalled how he suffered an emotional breakdown months after witnessing the 2017 Las Vegas shooting.
The country music star had just begun performing at the Route 91 Harvest festival in October 2017 when a gunman started firing into the crowd from the 32nd floor of a nearby hotel.
Aldean and his band managed to escape the stage unharmed but 60 people died and over 800 others were injured.
During an interview for Dax Shepard's Armchair Expert podcast on Monday, Jason reflected on how he didn't process the "horrible ordeal" at the time because he had agreed to perform on Saturday Night Live the weekend after the incident.
"Obviously, Saturday Night Live is something I've always wanted to play. It's like one of those things as an artist. It's an iconic show," he explained. "I hated that it was like that. Part of me was like, 'F**k, I don't wanna do it like that.' And we were shellshocked too."
Jason went on to share that he didn't begin to think about the tragic shooting until after his wife Brittany Aldean gave birth to their son Memphis in December 2017.
"I think for me, you know, I kind of had a breakdown in my house one day," the 48-year-old continued. "It was after my son was born and just all that heaviness of everything, just getting laid on you... For our little family, our little crew, we got so lucky, not one injury to any of our guys. And you're happy about that, but then there's like this guilt-ridden thing. It sucks."
And when co-host Dax asked Jason whether he had sought out therapy, the Big Green Tractor singer admitted that he hadn't yet.
"I guess (I'm) too Southern," he joked. "Here's the ironic thing. We funded a ton of therapy for all the crews and everybody else. My therapy was me, my wife, my band, all of us that were kind of there. We all talked about it amongst each other."
Elsewhere, Jason noted that the incident means he will always be connected to Las Vegas.
"At some point you can either kind of run from it or accept it and try and make something good out of it," the Georgia native added. "And that's kind of what we tried to do."
