Jason Aldean says when bullets started raining down on fans at the Route 91 Harvest Festival in Las Vegas, he assumed a speaker had blown.
“It just sounded like a crackling something," Aldean said in an interview with Today that aired Tuesday. “I'm kind of looking around like, 'What is that?' Trying to figure out what it is. Well then it stopped. So I was like, 'Alright, well they must have got it fixed.’
“And so I kept doing my thing, and then it happened again and it lasted longer the second time.”
The country star opened up about the mass shooting on Oct. 1 that claimed the lives of 58 people and injured more than 500 others during his set at the festival.
Aldean said he noticed his guitarist had moved from his usual spot on the stage. “I was actually kind of getting aggravated, so I looked over at my monitor guy that's on the side of the stage as if to say, 'What is that?' And, 'fix it.' And when I turned to look my guitar player had run behind me and was telling me to move, to 'let’s go,' and my security guy was running on stage telling me to run.”
Aldean said the massacre should be a wake-up call to Americans. “There’s so much focus on politics and race and all these other things that just… at the end of the day, we're all in this together,” he said.
“We spend so much time arguing with each other and not enough time working on the issue that's really the problem.”