“I’m not saying this in a pompous way, but I don’t give a shit about what people want from me. I never have, because I do what I do. I’m an artist. If you like it, you like it. If you don’t like it, you don’t like it.”
Serj Tankian is a happy man. Why wouldn’t he be? System Of A Down is more active than they have been in years, having played monster shows across the world this past year in some of the largest stadiums, none of it tied to new music or any obligations other than the band just getting together to perform.
“I love playing, man. I enjoy performing with System,” he says, reflecting on those recent shows. “I actually appreciate our music more now than I ever have. The nuances of it, the memories of making it and all of the intricacies, all of the good and bad — everything together is beautiful to me right now.”
Though System haven’t put out a new record in two decades, Tankian remains relentlessly creative. Over the past two years, he’s written film scores, performed orchestral works, released EPs, and published both a memoir and an art book. Seemingly, nothing can stop him.
These numerous twists and turns make his latest release, Covers, Collaborations & Collages, feel refreshingly straightforward. It’s a collection of tracks that have been sitting in Tankian’s archives for a minute — ranging back decades in some cases, while others are fairly recent. It feels like a portfolio referencing numerous spots of his career as a singer and solo musician — from the chameleonic electronic textures delivered on his Deadmau5 collaboration “A Seed,” to the cover of soft-rock singer-songwriter Chris de Burgh’s “I’m Counting On You,” which turns it into something hauntingly resonant with our current state of unrest.
None of the collaborations or covers feel obvious, yet all of it speaks to Tankian’s wide range of appreciation for emotive, deeply powerful songwriting. “I rarely say yes to rock or metal collaborations,” he says. “Rarely. They’ve got to be really interesting for me to dive into. I’d rather pick a jazz collaboration, or a classical collaboration, or just something I’ve never done. Because for me, that’s the beauty of art — presenting something you’ve never done [or] challenging yourself to create something you’ve never done.”
At this point in his career, Tankian has built something rare: a body of work that can’t be easily categorized, yet which maintains a clear artistic vision — one concerned with honesty, experimentation, activism and the belief that art should challenge both the person making it and the people consuming it.
Revolver spoke to Tankian about his new compilation, where he’s at creatively at this stage in his career, and what keeps him excited.
Travis Shinn
You work in all these different mediums: music, painting, writing. What happens when you’re not creative?
Serj Tankian Life sometimes takes you [towards] responsibilities where you don’t have time to be creative. I mean, the last number of months have been that way for me. We’ve been remodeling and moving, so I haven’t been as creative as I would like to be. I haven’t had the space and time, or the means, to actually sit down and write music or paint. And I hate it. As much as I love what I do in life, there’s always something missing and gnawing at you. And you need that. It’s my release, my meditation, my playtime. Without it, you become really tense. It’s not fun. But there are times in life where you have to deal with that as an artist, and just take care of other things.
Has it always been like that for you? Even before the band?
I started playing music when I was 19. I never played music when I was a kid. I was in university, and I started playing music as a way of meditating away from my worries and work and everything else. So in a way, ever since I’ve started playing music, that has been true.
There’s this restlessness I pick up on in your work—you’re always trying something slightly different. It’s hard to call you a metal musician because that seems like just one color in your palette.
Yeah, I mean, I’ve written classical music, I’ve written a symphony, I’ve written a jazz record with some friends, I do a lot of soundtracks, a lot of scores for film and TV. Experimental, electronic… I like dabbling in many fields of music. I paint. I do musically-composed paintings and exhibitions. I write — I’ve released two poetry books and a memoir. I just love doing art.
I mean, they’re all forms of creativity, and it doesn’t matter what the genre [or] medium is. It doesn’t matter what the form is. It doesn’t matter what the colors are, as long as you’re doing it and you’re creating. I’m a creator. And so, I don’t like sticking to one thing, because it gets boring and repetitive.
You know, irrespective of people’s expectations, I’ve been lucky enough to have enough commercial success in my life to do whatever the fuck I want to do.
When did you start thinking that way?
I think I always thought that way. I mean, part of it is may be the way I was brought up. My parents encouraged me to do whatever I wanted to do and always supported those decisions. They encouraged us to find our own path, in a way. They would discourage bad decisions because they knew something might not be a good fit, but as long as they [knew] you were excited about it…
I was brought up in a world where that was OK, so I never had the pressure of being told to be an engineer or whatever, which some parents push their kids towards because it’s a smart decision if you’re thinking about pragmatics and all that stuff. But I was never led that way, and I’m grateful to my parents for that.
I also think that’s my personality, just naturally. If something doesn’t excite me, I don’t do it. I mean, I’ve turned down a lot of opportunities that haven’t excited me that could have been good money. Because, to me, what’s the point? If I’m not excited by it, I’m not going to do a good job anyway. I’m not going to enjoy it. Art isn’t a job. It should be a passion.
Do you ever set parameters on a project, like figuring out how you want to do something within a specific framework?
Sometimes you do, sometimes it just comes to you, sometimes it’s commissioned. Like, you get hired to do a film, and the film is an hour-and-30 minutes, and you put out about 60 minutes of music. It’s not something that you’re planning on doing, it’s just something that you’re doing. But sometimes it’s something you plan.
During COVID, all my projects were stopped. I was in New Zealand, where we lived part of the year, and I was on my iPad in the middle of the night, just scrolling through voice memos that I had, because I always record musical ideas on voice memos. There were hundreds of them, and I’m like, “Some of these are really fucking cool!” But they were all, like, 5-6 seconds, right?
So, a thought popped into my head, and it was an adventurous thought: what if I put all of these disparate pieces together in one form? I record them all in the same tempo, and then make it this long piece. And so, I started doing that. It turned out to be a 23-minute piece of music called Disarming Time: A Modern Piano Concerto. It’s a piano concerto, but at times it’s rock [and] at times it’s electronic. It just evolves. And part of it was, “I wonder how many people will listen to a 23-minute piece of music?” Like, the mystery [of] an artist of going, “Would I listen?” … that kind of a thing made me do it.
So, yeah, I think sometimes you plan your own projects. Sometimes the inspiration comes from the limitation of musical instrumentation. You go, “I really feel like the vibe [of this film] is so vulnerable, I only want to use a piano and a cello,” for example. And you tell the director, “Are you cool with that?” You’ve got to start somewhere. You have to have an idea of what you want to do.
Travis Shinn
How did the new record, Covers, Collaborations & Collages, first come together?
It started with my Prius. I had this Prius for many years, and when I mix a song in my studio, I never really know how it really sounds until I listen to it in my Prius. So, I kept the Prius around for many years without driving it. And I kept on changing the battery every year, because I had to listen to everything [in there] — like, my final mix was always from the Prius. It wasn’t a great system, I just knew it well.
So, at one point, I’m like, “I can’t keep this Prius forever. I need to sell this Prius, but I have to mix.” I had a chunk of time [off] from other work — a month or two — so I was like, “I’m going to mix every song that I have in my archives that has vocals.” I ended up with over 100 pieces of music.
That was a blessing, because…you have so many sessions that you never really think [about]. Your mind can’t put together how many songs you have, but when you have mixes of all of them, and you listen to them, then you’re like, “Oh my god, I love that cover…why have I never released that?” You know, like, the Chris de Burgh cover, “I’m Counting On You.”
What makes a song attractive for you to cover?
Covers should be different enough for it to be appreciated on its own, yet still be a cover. If it’s too close…it’s still a cover, technically, but it’s not as entertaining. It’s not as fun. It’s just a different voice, or different people playing instrumentation that mimics the actual song. Like, what’s the point of that?
Your collaborators on this record come from extremely different worlds. Is that important to you?
Because I’ve had the songs for many years, and I’ve worked with [so many] different people, it just turned out that way. My friend Bic Runga, who’s an amazing singer-songwriter from New Zealand, we’ve been friends for a while. She was in L.A. recording maybe 15 years ago, and came over to [my] studio. I was playing her this one song [ed. “Things Unspoken”], and she liked it, and we ended up recording it together. It sat in my vault for many years, until I released it on this compilation.
But I do really like working on different things. It’s still a very magical process. So that might explain why the collaborations are with vastly different type of artists.
Talk to me about “When Death Arrives,” a cover you’d translated from Armenian into English.
My friend Albert and I translated that. Ruben Hakhverdyan, the author and the singer-songwriter, has this incredibly powerful grasp of the Armenian language. He’s kind of like a bard poet of Armenia. He was very anti-Soviet, but he did it in such a poetic way, and he was so loved that they never touched him. He’s old-school.
The song that he wrote that I covered was very much like a Bob Dylan song. The refrain just went on and on, and the lyrics changed, and they emotionally rose as they went along. I added a little chorus to give it a little differentiation and dynamics. I remember playing it for him at my house many, many years ago — I recorded this probably 20 years ago, bro. He liked it, and I’ve been wanting to release it [but] just never found the right avenue to release it, until I did this record.
It’s a beautiful song. The perspective is that of an artist that passes away, and it imagines their eyes being opened and seeing their own funeral. Like, people coming and saying goodbye — former lovers, people that you’ve wronged or people that have wronged you. [It’s got] all of those emotions, and the political aspects of where they live [in Armenia]. So many layers.
The translation isn’t perfect, because there’s certain things that wouldn’t relate to our times [or] where we live, so we took a little bit of a liberty [with the lyrics], which he was okay with. But besides that, the emotions are still there. It’s very much raw and guttural.
There must be a lot of pressure from others to just stick to the things that are guaranteed to deliver results and be successful, but you seem far more interested in chasing what’s interesting to you.
I’ve been fortunate enough to have had success with System Of A Down, so I have the freedom to take risks and experiment. I don’t take that for granted. I know that’s a privileged position to be in. But I also think it’s important to use that privilege to push boundaries and try new things, rather than just play it safe and do what’s expected.
I’d rather fail trying something new than succeed doing the same thing over and over again. I mean, if you’re always doing the same thing — if you’re always following the same formula — you’re going to stagnate. I never want to be in that position. I always want to be evolving… even if it means failing sometimes.
And I think people can tell when something is authentic versus when something is manufactured or done for commercial reasons. People aren’t stupid. They can sense that energy. I think it’s important to stay true to yourself and your vision, even if it means not having as much commercial success.
This interview has been edited and condensed for flow and clarity.