During a recent conversation with the Battleline Podcast, System of a Down drummer John Dolmayan opened up about some of the issues within the band that has been holding them back.
One of the big points that John brought up is that band frontman Serj Tankian “hasn’t really wanted to be in the band for a long time.”
Within that same conversation, the drummer shared that the band should have parted ways back in 2006. When asked to elaborate on that point, he shared the following (as transcribed by Blabbermouth):
“I think we should have moved on, and if Serj didn’t wanna be in the band at that time, we should have just moved on and done it with somebody else. But that’s what happens when you’re loyal and you really wanna make it work; you’ll put up with things that may be detrimental to the health of the band or the health of the situation.
“Maybe it would have been better if we moved on and got another singer for an album or two and continued to make music and brought Serj back later if he wanted to come back. That probably would have been better. But as it is, I think we wasted 15, maybe 20 years of our lives waiting.”
John goes on to talk about how the rest of the band wants to be more active when it comes to touring, but that Serj is not as game for that (mentioning that Serj messed up his back a while ago).
John continues:
“I don’t think this is sustainable. The rest of us wanna work a lot more than he does. Now I don’t know if that means we’re just gonna break up and forget about it and call it a career or if we’re gonna move forward with somebody else or if Serj is gonna come around.
“Ultimately, the best-case scenario for me is Serj comes around and we can do, like, 15, 20 shows a year. Even that would be enough. We’d be able to go to places that we haven’t gone in a long time and play in front of fans that have never seen us play. That’s important to me.
“I don’t know what’s gonna happen. Even talking about System kind of bums me out, because I know what our potential is. And I know that if we make an album, it’ll be fantastic ’cause we have songs that have been ready for five [or] six years now; we just have to go in and record ’em. And I don’t know if that’s gonna happen or not.”
You can check out the full interview with the System of a Down drummer below.
John Dolmayan on Why System of a Down Haven’t Made a New Album
