Country singer Eric Church reflected on the 2017 Las Vegas mass shooting, saying it “broke” him.
“It’s still raw in a lot of ways, but it affects you,” Church said in a Sunday interview with “Today.” “It broke me in a way.”
Church, who was one of the musical acts during the 2017 Route 91 Harvest country music festival in Las Vegas, played his set Friday, Sept. 29, 2017. A few days later on Oct. 1, during Jason Aldean’s set, a gunman opened fire from an above hotel room, killing 60 people and wounding hundreds more. It is the deadliest mass shooting by a lone gunman in American history.
Just a few days after the shooting, Church performed at the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville. During that performance, he performed the song “Why Not Me” and dedicated it to the mass shooting victims. Church told the crowd he decided to go ahead with his Opry performance because of Heather Melton, one of his fans, whose husband died in the shooting.
“The reason I’m here tonight is because of Heather Melton,” Church said. “What I saw, that moment in time that was frozen, there’s no bullets that can take it away.”
Church called the shooting “indelible.”
“The relationship between the artist and the fans in that moment in time is sacred. And those bullets shattered that,” Church said on “Today.”
The shooting was the start of a bad year for Church, he said. In 2018, he had emergency surgery for a blood clot in his chest. Then in July 2018, Church’s brother, Brandon, died.
“I think, up until that point, you can listen to the music, maybe, and you can see that I was brash, arrogant, in a lot of ways,” Church said on “Today.” “But it changes, when you have those things happen to you. And I think it made the music more humble and, maybe, more observant.”
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