Metal Anarchy

During a recent appearance on the Ultimate Guitar podcast, System Of A Down’s Daron Malakian opened up about Serj Tankian’s past offer to leave the band. According to him, the group did try out some other singers, but “it was something [he] never really wanted to do.”

Malakian said the following:

“It was something that I never really wanted to do. For me, System Of A Down is us four. If one of us four isn’t doing System Of A Down, I don’t really wanna do System Of A Down. Did we think about that? Sure. But did we really pursue it deeply? No. We tried. I don’t wanna get into names. We tried, and whoever we tried, he sounded good.

People would think, ‘Oh, Daron is the one that would want that.’ I was the one that was most against it. I was, like, ‘I don’t wanna look to my left and see other people.’ System is System, and if that’s not gonna be System, then I don’t know if that’s the System I wanna be a part of.

But, yeah, all that kind of happened because there was a time we were kind of, like, ‘Well…’ ‘Cause when we took our hiatus, we didn’t know what was gonna happen. Some of us expected that it might only have been a couple years and maybe we would’ve come back.”

He also added:

“Look, man, we all get along really well now. But, yeah, through the years there’s been frustrations with each other, for one reason or another. Some of it’s [Serj’s] fault, some of it’s my fault, some of it’s John’s fault, some of it’s Shavo’s fault. It’s not all, like, ‘Oh, it’s just between Daron and Serj.’ It’s a band, and we have four really different personalities in the band. But now we get along really well. The thing is, as friends, we’ve always gotten along. It’s band politics and the band is where our disagreements were. We never really had problems with each other outside of the band. ‘Cause you’ve got some people that are, like, ‘I can’t stand to be in the room with that guy.’ We were never that — we were never that. We always had respect for each other. We always loved each other. We always considered each other brothers. And still are, and still feel that way, and we’re still proud of what we’ve achieved with each other as a band and as four Armenian guys too; that’s also something.

So yeah, I’m not interested or really kind of never was interested [in having a different singer in System Of A Down]. I think Serj might have said something in his book about [how the guy we tried out not ended up not working out] because the guy couldn’t do the growls or something, and that’s why we didn’t [pick him to replace Serj], and that’s not true. [Serj] and I have never had this conversation of why it didn’t happen. But really the reason why it didn’t happen is I kind of was the one that was, like, ‘I don’t think I wanna pursue this. I don’t wanna do this without him.’ … Looking on the outside of the band. I’m a fan of that. I’m not trying to change that. Never was.”

[via Blabbermouth]