The kind of tragedy you can never get over. This week, Eric Church is the guest on Anderson Cooper’s CNN Podcast All There Is with Anderson Cooper, where Cooper focuses on different elements of griefs and how that impacts people in so many different ways. Church has been through many tough moments in his life, notably losing his brother, Brandon, in 2018 when he passed away at just 36 years old, which he spoke about in-depth. And Cooper also asked him about the devastating attack on Route 91 Harvest Festival that took the lives of 60 country music fans, and left hundreds more wounded on October 1st, 2017. A 64-year-old man named Stephen Paddock rained down over 1,000 rounds on the Las Vegas country music crowd from his 32nd-floor suites in the Mandalay Bay hotel… all for reasons that still remain completely unclear. In fact, despite it being the most deadly mass shooting in American history, what we know about Stephen Paddock, is shockingly miniscule. Headliner Jason Aldean was onstage at the time, and his bass player later found a round stuck in his guitar, but Jake Owen was also performed there that day, Josh Abbott Band, Big & Rich and more. Eric had performed at that festival on Friday night, just 48 hours before the shooting, and he was scheduled to play the Grand Ole Opry just days later, on Tuesday, and that’s when he delivered one of the most powerful performances of his career, debuting a song called “Why Not Me,” which was a tear-soaked tribute to the victims of this senseless act of violence. He was inspired by the late Sonny Melton, who was supposed to be at the Opry to see Eric Church on October 4th, but unfortunately passed away in Las Vegas. Sonny’s wife, Heather, did an interview with Cooper just days after he passed, and she told him how much Sonny loved Eric Church, and how that was his favorite artist and the reason they had attended the festival in the first place. Understandably, Eric says he still thinks about what happened in Las Vegas all the time, saying the interview was “the impetus” for what happened at the Opry: “And I got sent that right after it happened, and that interview was really the impetus for what happened on the Grand Ole Opry. I wrote a song called ‘Why Not Me.’ Because you go through this moment of, okay, I played Friday, and this happened Sunday, why didn’t it happen Friday? And you go through, it could have been me. Just to see the people on Friday night, and to see how they were so full of life. They were into every song, and I even walked down off the stage and walked all the way out to my sound guy in the middle of the crowd, and I shook everybody’s hand on the last song. And I walked down one side and I came back the other. I don’t normally do that, and I did it that night because it was just the spirit was so great. And then to see what happened right after that, it just, it spun me.” Eric said “something broke in [him]” after that tragedy, and it changed the way he viewed being onstage, because that used to be his safe place. No matter what was going on his life, he could always get onstage and forget about everything else: “I had played Friday, and the shooting was on a Sunday. And that following Tuesday, I was playing the Grand Ole Opry. Somebody sent me that right after the shooting had happened, it was such a, um — something broke in me when that happened. Onstage was always this place that, for all my life, that I could go and whatever was happening in my personal life or anything, I could go onstage. And I had that moment of communion with the fans, and the spirit moves, and we give it to each other back and forth, and that was safe for me. And it never occurred to me that there could be any way for that to not be safe. And after Vegas happened, those bullets shattered that safety, and it — something broke in me.” Eric admits he understandably went through “a fair amount of PTSD,” explaining how the reminder of that tragedy lingered in the back of his mind, and he still thinks about it often to this day: “[I] went through a period for a while where I had a fair amount of PTSD. I went through a couple years of that. It was always there, always in the back of your mind. And I still think about it.” It was a life-altering moment for anyone involved, but especially those who lost their life and the loved ones who still deal with the grief of that horrific loss. Eric’s song is still such a powerful piece of art, and if you’ve never seen the performance from the Opry stage, wow… it’s absolutely incredible: They show part of Cooper’s interview with Heather Melton in the podcast too, and the full episode is available below. The post “I Still Think About It”: Eric Church Reflects On Tragic Las Vegas Shooting & The PTSD He Suffered After first appeared on Whiskey Riff.