After Vegas, Jason Aldean carries the weight of tragedy

NASHVILLE, TENN. » Last October, Jason Aldean was in a Las Vegas hospital visiting some of the victims injured in a mass shooting at a country music festival a week earlier. On that Sunday afternoon, the country star turned to his longtime manager, Clarence Spalding.

“He looked at me and said, ‘This will be the hardest thing I ever do,’” Spalding recalled. “And it was.”

Aldean, the reigning Academy of Country Music’s entertainer of the year with a new album out this Friday, has built his career and reputation on his live shows that entertain tens of thousands every year. He had returned to meet face-to-face with those who had survived a terrible trauma during his performance at the festival, which had left him with lingering feelings of guilt.

In one room, a woman was still in a coma as he stood by her bed. Aldean recorded a message on her cell phone, promising to bring her to a show when she got better. Those moments in those hospital rooms were heavy with emotion, Spalding said.

“Jason would walk in and somebody who had been shot in the arm, leg, face or wherever would just start crying because it was such an emotional thing to see him,” Spalding said.

Aldean was onstage when the gunman started shooting with high-powered weapons at the fans from hotel room window across the street from the outdoor Route 91 Harvest Festival. That night in October, 59 people were killed and hundreds more injured in what has become the nation’s deadliest mass shooting in modern history.

The Macon, Georgia-born star has been singing about smalltown, working class life since he started in Nashville two decades ago, and said he now feels a connection to the survivors of another recent shooting at a high school in Parkland, Florida.

“Unless anybody has witnessed anything like that or been a part of it, it’s really hard for people to really understand where you’re coming from on that stuff,” Aldean said in a recent interview with The Associated Press. “It’s like the kids from the school in Florida, that shooting. I get it, man. I understand how they are feeling.” About 40 members of his band and crew, as well as his pregnant wife, Brittany, were all there at the festival. Spalding said two of their tour buses were shot, as well as their lighting board and stage. Aldean’s bass player found a bullet fragment in his bass guitar.