Jason Aldean went on Audacity podcast Coop's Rockin' Country Saturday Night to defend his song Try That in a Small Town, People reported.

“If you've got common sense, you can look at the video and see, I'm not sayin' anything that's not true,” Aldean said on Wednesday's episode.

Aldean is referring to the music video of the song which includes footage of the Maury County Courthouse in Tennessee. The courthouse was where an 18-year-old Black man was lynched in 1927. It was also the site where a 2020 protest was held against the deaths of several Black people at the hands of law enforcement.

Jason Aldean said that the listeners' biggest issue to the song was the inclusion of guns in the lyrics.

“I mentioned a gun, that’s a ‘no, no' right now,” he explained. The full verse says, “Got a gun that my granddad gave me / They say one day they're gonna round up / Well, that s**t might fly in the city, good luck.”

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The song rose to number one on the Hot Country Songs chart. It then went up to number two on the Billboard Hot 100 after the release of the music video.

However, CMT pulled the music video out of rotation the week after it was released. This and the resulting backlash online prompted Aldean to issue a statement on X (formerly Twitter) saying that the accusations made against him were “dangerous.”

Other country music artists like Sheryl Crow took to X to comment on the song.

saying, “This is not American or small-town. It's just lame,” Crow said.