Serj Tankian Describes Telling System of a Down to Find a New Singer

Next year marks two decades since System of a Down released a new album. Although they released two new songs in 2020 to draw attention to Azerbaijan’s invasion of Nagorno-Karabakh, they reached a creative impasse years ago. The group chose to go on touring and celebrating their legacy for their fans and, as frontman Serj Tankian writes in his new book — Down With the System: A Memoir (Of Sorts), which comes out Tuesday — they still have fun performing live. (They have a gig scheduled with Deftones in San Francisco in August.)

A few years ago, Tankian and guitarist Daron Malakian opened up about the creative breakdown within the band, after Malakian said the rest of the band had to “beg” Tankian to make System’s last albums, 2005’s Mezmerize and Hypnotize. Tankian then replied via Facebook revealing that he was the reason the band went on hiatus in 2006. He wrote that he felt Malakian was controlling too much of the creative process. So the band split and Tankian released solo albums exploring genres he couldn’t with System including jazz, classical, and punk, and found a new interest in scoring films.

When the band reconvened in 2010, Tankian proposed a four-tiered agreement that would allow each member of the band to contribute equally. Ultimately, they couldn’t find common ground and decided it was best to just tour. “My only regret is that we have been collectively unable to give you another SOAD record,” Tankian wrote. “For that I apologize.”

In a revelatory excerpt from Down With the System, Tankian writes about how tense the environment felt as they were figuring out what to do with themselves.

What is a band? Is it simply a bunch of people who get together to create music? If you don’t have any gigs, are you still a band? What if you only play shows, but you don’t create any new music? Are you still a real band, or are you just a glorified cover band? And is there anything wrong with that?

When I decided to quit the jewelry business and then shrug off the idea of law school [before joining System of a Down], the band I was playing in had never played a show or released any music. We didn’t have any fans, at least none we weren’t related to or didn’t know personally. But that band felt real to me because we had a vision. It had vitality. That was more important than recordings or concerts.

In the year or two after playing in Yerevan [in 2015], System of a Down felt like it was largely on cruise control. We did those Latin American tour dates, we played some festivals in the U.S., and then a run of more than 20 European tour dates in the summer of 2017. Ultimately, for me, it felt like just a part-time job, albeit one that paid significantly better than most people’s full-time gigs. In fact, it paid better than what was essentially my full-time gig.

At that point, much more of my time was being split between two main ventures: film and video game composing, and painting. I’d written the scores for a few independent films and a documentary, and was taking meetings with studios like Fox, Disney, and Lionsgate for bigger projects. A few years earlier, I’d also started painting, and matching each work with a musical composition unique to that painting. I wanted people to experience something truly synesthetic — to see my music and hear my art, all at the same time. I’d had my first exhibition of this sort of multimedia art in 2013. I later partnered with an Armenian tech company, Arloopa, that offered optical recognition software for your smartphone that would unlock the composition associated with each painting. All this stuff gave me that same liberating feeling of discovery that I’d gotten when I’d first started making music decades earlier.

Daron, Shavo [Odadjian], and John [Dolmayan] were always pushing to do more with System of a Down. I’d been the one holding them back, mostly because I didn’t really want to tour. I’d never loved life on the road much before, and now I had a wife and a young child at home. To make things worse, on that European run in 2017, I messed up my back pretty badly. After a rough flight and who knows how many different soft hotel beds, I woke up one morning in Belgium in extreme agony, barely able to walk. I saw a chiropractor backstage who worked on me for a while, but I had to Tiger Balm my way through the rest of the tour. Even after getting home, I was in serious pain for three or four months. My back has never really been the same since, and the constant travel that comes with being on the road always seems to aggravate it.

Even when the band was making new music, I didn’t find the life cycle of a major-label artist particularly satisfying. We’d typically spend six months writing, six months recording, and then two to three years touring and promoting. That means that two-thirds to three-quarters of your time as a signed artist is spent doing things that didn’t feel very artistically fulfilling or creative.

The obvious riposte to all this is that if you’re successful, you get paid quite well for your trouble. System is lucky enough to make royalties from selling music, and that income is reasonably consistent. If you outspend that income, you can always refill the coffers with big checks from touring. Playing live can become a bit like visiting the world’s most generous ATM.

But remember: I’d never wanted to be someone who made decisions because of money. I recognize it’s a tremendous privilege to be in a position to not have to do exactly that, but I can’t ignore the fact that not making decisions based on money was what had led me to that privilege in the first place. As it happened, I was pretty good at staying within my budget anyway, so the financial lure of touring was never going to outweigh all the negatives. With music, I’ve never made compromises and it’s always worked out, so why start now?

Toward the end of 2017, we had a band meeting at [System manager] Beno’s office. When I arrived, I told everyone that I had an item I wanted to add to the agenda. We went through the rigamarole of regular business discussions, and then it came time for my item.

“So, who’s going to throw me a going-away party?” I asked the group. “Do one of you guys want to be the master of ceremonies?” I laughed a little, but I was serious. “Look guys, I’ve been very clear that I’m no longer interested in touring both due to my back and because it’s just no longer something within my vision.

“The thing is, though,” I continued, “I don’t want to hold you guys back. This is your dream. This is what you’ve worked for your whole life. You deserve to have this.” I looked at Daron, Shavo, and John, knowing what I said next would hit hard.

“I think you guys should find a new singer.”

For the longest time, System of a Down was about the four of us. We’d built it up from nothing, we’d been through all the battles together along the way, and if any one of us left, it simply wouldn’t be the same thing anymore. A couple of years earlier, I’d even tried to codify this with a legal document that stated that if someone left the band for any reason — other than, God forbid, dying — that the remaining members couldn’t use the band name without him. Everyone else resisted that idea, probably because they sensed I was looking for a way out of the band at the time, and they weren’t ready to kiss it goodbye. I’d initially been upset that they didn’t see System the same way I did, but after a while, I stopped being so precious about it, and just thought of these three guys not as my bandmates but as my close friends.

That’s who they are to me still. Shavo is one of the nicest, happy-go-lucky guys I’ve ever met in my life. He gets along with everyone, even at the worst of times. I can remember riding in the back of a bumpy camper van once with a bad flu, and as soon as I started to feel sick, he insisted on giving me his seat on another band’s more comfortable bus so I could recover. That’s Shavo: joyful, hopeful, helpful.

When I first met John, we got along due to our mutual sensibilities. We both appreciated reading and reason. By the time we all sat down together in Beno’s office in 2017, John and I weren’t just friends and bandmates; we were brothers-in-law. In a fairly unlikely turn of events, he’d married [my wife] Ange’s sister, Diana. In a somewhat more concerning development, he’d also grown into a fervent Trump supporter. Yet even though I was at the far opposite end of the political spectrum, backing Bernie Sanders at the time, we could always sit at the dinner table and laugh with each other. No matter what happened, John always had my back, and I had his.

And Daron and I … well, we have always had a long, complicated relationship. The love of music welded our unique friendship early on despite our age difference. Artistically and even politically, we were like-minded partners at first. We both had a punk-rock ethos from different sources and experiences. Musically, we’d often finish each other’s sentences and had this incredible harmonic resonance in our voices. But it was almost impossible to separate our personal relationship from our creative one. It got messy at times, though neither of us ever let it fall apart. He had a possessiveness I didn’t always understand or appreciate, especially when it started affecting my relationships with others. I think he viewed me like an older brother, and I was protective of him, as I felt he was emotionally vulnerable. He has always made music the priority in his life and remains stubbornly true to his own artistic vision. Even though that has sometimes put us at odds, I have a lot of respect and love for him. So what did I want for these three people whom I was closer with than anyone outside my own family? I wanted them to be happy. I wanted them not to have to depend on my health, my back, or my willingness to spend months on the road each year for them to have this band that they wanted so much. These three guys meant more to me than System of a Down had ever meant — and they still do.

Of course, I wanted me to be happy, too. It seemed like the solution was to ease myself out of the band while they invited in a replacement. I told them I’d even help train a new singer.

“Think about it,” I said. “We can be the unique band that’s able to make this transition amicably, where the member of the band who’s leaving is 100 percent on-board with the new direction. I’ll do press and talk about it positively. I’ll make it clear that I support you guys.” I don’t think the guys were totally shocked by my announcement.

In fact, I almost sensed they’d expected it, or at least something like it. They didn’t dismiss the idea outright, but their collective response at the time was for me to essentially pump the brakes. They asked me not to announce that I was leaving the band. They promised not to pressure me into touring anymore. Management would merely present show offers as they came up. If I said yes, we’d do them. If I said no, we wouldn’t. End of story.

It sounded reasonable enough to me.

I sort of thought they’d forgotten about the whole idea of hiring a new singer, but a year or so later, John, Shavo, and I were at a fundraiser in Glendale, and this singer I knew got up and sang this beautiful Armenian song. Shavo was sitting next to me at the table. He leaned over and tapped me on the shoulder.

“By the way,” he nodded toward the singer, “we tried this guy out as a singer. The only problem was that he couldn’t scream and growl.”

I was taken aback. Not that they had been auditioning replacements, but that they’d kept it a secret.

“Why didn’t you guys ever tell me?” I whispered. Shavo shrugged. “I dunno.”

I turned toward Shavo, now looking directly at him. “Listen, he’s a good singer,” I said. “I can literally take him in the parking lot right now and teach him how to growl. You should really consider him.”

In more recent years, I pitched another friend to them as a potential replacement that they ought to seriously consider. But I don’t think they ever did.

Excerpt from DOWN WITH THE SYSTEM: A Memoir (of Sorts) by Serj Tankian. Copyright © 2024. Available from Hachette Books, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

From Rolling Stone US.