Two years after the deadly tragedy that occurred at Travis Scott’s Astroworld festival in Houston, the rapper is finally opening up about how he’s dealt with the trauma from the incident.
On Wednesday (November 15), GQ Magazine named Scott GQ’s Musician of the Year in addition to revealing the platinum-certified lyricist as the featured model for the cover of the Man of the Year issue. In the extensive interview, Scott opened up about the events that occurred in November 2021 at his hometown festival.
More specifically, he said what occurred that night is something he’ll never forget and confessed the fatal incident constantly occupies space in his active mind and took him months to recover from
“Yeah, I always think about it,” Scott said of the Astroworld tragedy. “Those fans were like my family. You know, I love my fans to the utmost.”
In the process, Scott revealed that the rollout for his chart-topping UTOPIA album was originally initiated days before the Astroworld following the release of his singles “Escape Plan” and “Mafia.” He also went on to describe how therapeutic the process of making music was for him in the aftermath of the mass-casualty event.
“Making music, you think about things that go on in life and things that happen in your life, and you dial in on things,” Scott said. “That moment for families, for the city, you know, it was devastating. And when it came to making, like even finishing the album…I got back into it probably like, I don’t know, months and months and months after. And the idea of just even getting back into music, working on music and just even getting into that, was therapeutic of being able to channel some of the energy into production and sounds and finishing it.”
Travis Scott went on to explain how another step in this process to deal with the tragedy that occurred years ago was so way that the UTOPIA album deep-cut “My Eyes.”
“The things I deal with on a day-to-day basis and the fact of how it could be misunderstood and the struggles of life and all aspects of life,” he said while adding, “The constant weight that’s put on. That you carry, you know. And just a vision through my eyes.”