Every year, 42-year-old Steve Munoz, his wife Teresa, and a group of friends travel to Las Vegas from their home in Renton, Washington for a pre-season NHL game. In 2017, the group decided to attend the Vegas country music festival Route 91 Harvest instead. Munoz now works closely with #LOVEWINS, an organization that raises money for the victims and families of those affected by the Route 91 attack.

The Thursday after the concert, I dropped my son off at hockey practice and got back into my car and “When She Says Baby” by Jason Aldean started to play on the radio. The first bullets came out at the end of his song, “Any Ol’ Barstool,” but the main spray, when he ran off the stage, was during “When She Says Baby.” It completely froze me. I was numb. I lost it, just started bawling. That song brought back the gunshots and the screaming and the people running. I had to turn it off right away. It took me about a month to be able to listen to it.

My best friend’s wife told me that she had no problem listening to that song because she didn’t want to let the [shooter] take control of her anymore. I thought about that for a while and one day I went into my car, plugged my phone in, and put the song on. I forced myself to listen to the whole thing. It was very, very hard; I wanted to just shut it off. But I had my friend’s words in my head: Don’t let him control you.

The first time we went to another concert was the Friday after Route 91. It was Imagine Dragons at the Key Arena in Seattle, and we had bought our kids tickets for the concert as a birthday present earlier in the summer. They both knew what had happened, but they were still young enough to not say, “I don’t want to go to a concert because that’s where you were at when you almost died.” They never brought that up. We considered asking some friends to see if they would take our two kids to the concert, but the more we talked about it, the more we thought that we needed to do it.

Being inside an arena, we knew it was going to be tough. As we got to our seats, it hit home that I had to pull my two kids to the side and tell them, “Listen. Here’s where we go in. Here’s the section where our seats are. If for whatever reason there’s a fire, an earthquake, any emergency...” I didn’t mention a shooting. But the fact that I had to explain an escape route to my 11 and 12-year-old sucked, and I really had to compose myself. But that was our new life. That was something that we had experienced, and now that’s something that I hope to instill in them, because you never know when you’re going to need that information.

Imagine Dragons, being a Las Vegas band, brought up the shooting. They said, “A few days ago, there was this horrific event in Las Vegas.” My wife and I were looking at each other and trying not to get choked up. Then they sang Tom Petty’s “I Won’t Back Down” and dedicated it to everybody at the concert, those lives that were lost and everybody who survived. As soon as they sung that song, my wife and I completely lost it. It was a very touching moment, but everything kind of rushed back through us from the festival. It was hard to be there and to let the emotions go with both of our kids watching. We just told them that it hit home.

We’ve definitely healed from Route 91, and going to concerts has helped. Before that weekend, I’d never been to a music festival before, but I’m definitely more obsessed with going to concerts now. Listening to country music was a big part of it. I have all kinds of tastes when it comes to music, but ever since Route 91, I’ve only really listened to country. I felt like if did not listen to music, I was giving that guy control because I would be associating all the evil that had happened with the music of that night. We all heal and deal with things differently, but for me, the music was what helped me get past the darkness of that night.

When she attended Route 91, Steve’s wife Teresa Munoz, 38, was a reluctant concert goer. But, like her husband, she is now dedicated to live music. Her 2018 calendar is filled with shows.

Immediately after Route 91, I didn’t want to hear a single country song. That was a little bit of a challenge, because Steve was finding comfort in hearing it, and it took me longer to get there. As I became a little more comfortable with the experience and handling the emotions around it, I was able to listen. Then I became kind of obsessed with hearing all the different artists that had been at the festival.

Since Route 91, I’ve paid so much more attention to lyrics, instead of just the melody. The meaning of a song is now something that I’m connecting with and finding to be more enjoyable than I had in the past. A couple of weeks after the festival, I was in the car, and a Cole Swindell song called “Middle of a Memory” came on. I just completely broke down. I was picturing the people that had been killed, and how they were in the middle of making these great memories, and how they left in the middle of that. We have tickets to go see Cole Swindell next month, and I have already decided that I’m gonna go on a beer run during that song. But that is the only song that I really can’t hear now.

Soon after Route 91, I was at a work conference in Las Vegas, and part of it involved a Train concert. I was with my friend, who had also been at the festival, and I was struggling the whole time. At one point I got very uncomfortable and started to shake a little bit. I was like, “I can do this.” I was really trying to mentally get past it. Then they started to flash the stage lights on and off. It took me right back to the festival, because at the time that the shooting was going on, they turned the stage lights on and illuminated the crowd. So when those lights came back on at the Train concert, I instantly felt like I was transported back to that moment. I was shaking uncontrollably, and I started to cry. I didn’t want to leave the event, so we went outside for a few moments. When we came back in, we went to the higher up seats that were completely blocking the stage lights, so I wasn’t able to see them anymore. But I couldn’t get into the concert at all, and we ended up leaving early.

In the past, I was never a huge concert person, because I really love the radio version that you learn to know, so I get disappointed when I’m at an event and they sing it differently. But all of our concerts this year are going to be country concerts. I was in a little bit of a decline on country music when the festival came around, but I feel this draw to it now. It’s a part of us because of the experience that we went through. I also want to make more positive memories as a way to stack against the negative ones. We were very, very, very lucky in the worst situation, and I don’t want to ever forget that. Now I want to see as many of those people [who played at Route 91] as possible, because it shows us they’re OK, and we’re OK.