Eric Church has released a lyric video for "Why Not Me," a new song he wrote in response to the mass shooting that took place in Las Vegas on Oct. 1.

Church was the headliner at the Route 91 Harvest Festival in Las Vegas on Friday, Sept. 29, and that Sunday during Jason Aldean‘s headlining on the closing night of the festival, a gunman opened fire into the crowd from his hotel room above, killing at least 58 people and wounding nearly 500 more.

When Church returned to the stage for the first time after the tragedy at the Grand Ole Opry on Wednesday, Oct. 4, he tearfully paid tribute to the victims of the Las Vegas shooting both in words and with a new song he had written that was inspired in part by Sonny Melton, a huge fan of Church's whose story made headlines after he sacrificed his life to save his wife during the shooting.

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The lyric video he's released for "Why Not Me" couldn't be any simpler, giving fans the emotionally charged lyrics to the new song in stark white lettering over a black background with no visual adornment. "Why Not Me" finds Church wondering aloud some people survive a random act of violence and others die.

"Why you with your long hair flowin' / And you with your fresh tattooed skin / And you from the Western Virginia / That you'll never get to see again / As darkness descended the desert / And a bad actor starred in his play / Why you from Tennessee did life capture / And me from Tenessee get away," Church muses in the "Why Not Me" lyrics.

"And when the morning sun hit the mountain / And a glorious still calmed the breeze / I asked the God of all knowing wisdom / Why you, and why not me?" he sings in the chorus.

“Something broke in me on Sunday night when [the shooting] happened, and the only way I’ve ever fixed anything that’s been broken in me is with music,” Church told the audience when he introduced the powerful song at the Opry. “So I wrote a song.”

Click on the video at the top of the story to see the emotionally-charged lyrics to Eric Church's "Why Not Me."

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