Serj Tankian: “When I started music, I felt like I was given this incredible gift to make whatever comes to me. I don’t ever want to question it”

The way Serj Tankian tells it, some of his songs have been lonely for a long time. It’s something the System Of A Down legend realised not too long ago when he was sifting through his own mountainous archives of unreleased material. He came across tracks that had been recorded, some as far back as 20 years ago, and, ultimately, abandoned, discarded or temporarily shelved. Songs that – for all the solo albums, EPs and singles he’s released to date – just never got their chance.

This is the year he decided to take action.

He scoured through this music and would find himself pondering, “Oh, this is a song I really want to release.” But the problem was that one lonely track would not suffice. More digging followed. And then some more. Then the eureka moment happened.

“Wait a minute,” Serj would say to himself as one song suddenly chimed, in his head, with another he had uncovered. “This one has friends!”

That jigsaw approach has resulted in his excellent, beguiling new record, Covers, Collaborations & Collages. Talking to Kerrang! while he takes a stroll through his neighbourhood, the affable Serj sees it as his answer to Tom Waits deep cuts set Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers & Bastards.

“There were pieces from different times in his life, different experiences, and he still found ways for them to fit together on a compilation album.”

It’s a feat Serj has pulled off brilliantly himself. Don’t be fooled by the title – despite the scattered sounding name, there is a tightness to this record, recurring themes and images crops up. A lot of love has gone into them. And, as ever with Serj, a hell of a lot of ideas.

When he embarked upon his solo career with 2007’s Elect The Dead, he had one motto: ‘No limits, no rules’ and that certainly holds true on CC&C. One moment you will hear him sounding like he’s tearing up as he covers Chris de Burgh, the next he is cackling ‘I’m gonna eat your soul and munch it, munch it, munch it’ on Sonic Expulsions. Yes, you will hear him sing over guitars on Kneeling Away From The Sun, but also wrangling with deadmau5’s weird EDM arrangements on A Seed.

It’s the vivid latest chapter in a solo career that has already seen him pivot from rock-leaning material to a full-on symphonic classical album inspired by orca whales. And not many people can say they’ve done that.

Armed with a new record, fresh from releasing his revelatory and candid memoir Down With The System last year and with some huge System Of A Down stadium dates scheduled for 2026, there is a lot to catch up on…

Let’s start with one of the most powerful moments on your new album: your cover of Chris de Burgh’s Counting On You. For the music video, you seem incredibly moved by the song as you’re performing it – why does it resonate with you so much?
“That’s one of the real reasons I wanted to do this project. I’m a huge Chris de Burgh fan from when I was in my teens and so, for me, releasing that song was a huge deal. I’ve had it in my back pocket for a long time, and I’ve been wanting to put it out. It’s a beautiful song between a father and a daughter and it’s very powerful in speaking of our times and the man-made destruction that we’ve caused on the planet. It’s like our generation handing the baton and saying, ‘I hope you can do something better than we did’ to younger people. Speaking to your own child about that is very personal, vulnerable and emotional because you’re talking about future. I’m at an age where there’s 20 years left – if I’m lucky, maybe more – to be able to enjoy this planet. But the future doesn’t belong to me, it belongs to our children, and we have to be cognisant and responsible for their sake about the planet that we’re leaving for them. Are we leaving this a better place than we found it? One of the goals of humanity is to leave something a better place than you found it, in my opinion. We’re supposed to be the gardeners of this beautiful world, not the destroyers. We’re hoping that our children can take on the responsibility of making this a better place at a time where we’ve left them on the brink of environmental degradation and destruction, not to even mention possible world war, and everything else…”

On Apocalyptic Dance you sing about how ‘there are no more empires, just burning campfires’ and it feels depressingly close to what we’re seeing on the news every day…
“Absolutely. I mean, humanity is building empires, but what we’re actually building is a world that is going to be dependent on campfires, on being able to heat yourself on the street, what with homelessness and everything that we see today with income disparity and the inability to provide a comfortable life for your families. There’s a lot of struggle in the world.”

Are you confident in where the next generation are going to take the baton?
“It’s hard to answer that question. There are so many factors and layers of difficulties in terms of the planet that we’re living on right now. So I don’t know. I’m hoping. We live in hope.”

One of the other covers is Ruben Hakhverdyan’s When Death Arrives – a song that’s like an artist writing their own elegy. Was that selected because, as you said earlier, you’ve been thinking about how long you might have left?
“I actually recorded that with a friend maybe 20 years ago. So it’s nothing new for me to wrestle with mortality. We helped translate that song from Armenian, and I played it for Ruben Hakhverdyan when he was at my house. I just love that song, the lyrics to me are stunning – they are the message of an artist who has passed away and is almost watching his own funeral, and all of the thoughts that embody that, all of the people that visit and their thoughts.”

A world away from that, you’re also not afraid to get silly on Sonic Expulsions with its amazing ‘I’m going to take your soul and munch it, munch it, munch it, munch it’ line. Humour has always been a part of your work, but what we wanted to ask is…
“If you’re asking if a joke is a joke, then it’s not a good joke!”

No, not that, more is the humour in your songwriting just your personality, or does part of you feel you need comedic reprieve in order to let the heaviness elsewhere land sometimes?
“It’s just who I am, honestly. I mean, sometimes you write a piece of music and it makes you feel a certain way, and the lyrics come with it, or the words may not come, but the feelings do. And some things are more comical than others. For that one, that’s a stream-of-consciousness song. I never wrote lyrics for it, because had I written them down I probably wouldn’t have had so much munching going on! It’s very much a first-take type of song. I mean, you can tell from the chorus, because I’m searching for words as I’m singing them. The vocal melodies are there, and I’m grasping for words. It’s a great songwriting process, but usually you end up taking that as a demo and then fill in the blanks so that they make more sense. In my case, I’m too lazy or stupid to do it!”

Be kind about your munching, Serj…
“Okay, not ‘stupid’, but I think ever since I started painting on canvas and mixed media, you learn that when something is finished, you don’t have to perfect it. You just have to let it be what it is. Sometimes the manifestation of a song is just its original form. The song that we just mentioned isn’t, in that case, laziness, so I retract my statement! I think if I had felt like I could do a better job at intellectualising the lyrics and writing them and re-recording them, I probably would have. But when the vibe is there, you don’t want to touch it.”

Speaking of vibes, you hooked up with deadmau5 on A Seed, which is an EDM song but, well, certainly not a typical one. Between the hypnotic repetition of the music and your chanting, it’s almost like you’re trying to induce the listener into a trance…
“It was very challenging to sing that but I like challenges, I like getting stuff where I’ve never done something and I go into it and see what comes out. This is one of those where it’s just very, very unique (laughs). It reminds me of my friend Lauren Valencia, who we used to work with, both with System and on my own stuff. She passed away a few years ago. We miss her dearly. She was the conduit to deadmau5’s management. They sent a song, and I listened to it and I grabbed my poetry books, highlighted stuff that I wanted to use and took a crack at it on the microphone. It turned out to be a unique song because there is no particular melody, except for the piano parts. There are no real melodies that I’m following – it’s more like very unguided chants with weird sounds and vocal layers coming in and out!”

Let’s put this new solo album into context for a moment. In your book, you were very open that your solo career initially was launched to address a sense of needing to feel artistic validation that maybe at times in SOAD you didn’t feel. There was a hole in you. Have you healed that part of yourself?
“It’s healed a lot over time. I think in 2007 when I put out Elect The Dead, it was the height of me trying to prove to myself the value of my artistic existence within the band. By releasing it, I had a very fun confirmation and verification of that value, and it gave me a lot of confidence. And then for my second record, I basically wrote an art record, Imperfect Harmonies, which was completely different and unexpected, but that’s what came to me, and that’s what I released. And then I ended up with a third record called Harakiri, which is a rock record. The body of my solo career gave me the confidence to come back to System Of A Down with a different kind of perspective, in a different light. And right now – and not just because of me, obviously – we’re having the best time of our lives as a band. We’re really enjoying each other on tour. It’s so, so welcoming – we’re very deeply involved with each other’s lives, personally. It’s what I’ve always wanted the band to be. We had to go back to our own corners, assess things and come back together for us to really appreciate what we have in every way.”

Did your honesty in the book change anything? Did it jog any conversations that have led to the fact that, say, you’ll be in the UK next summer playing stadiums?
“The book, for me, changed a lot because it was a therapeutic exercise. You write it down, you put it out and you let it go, you know what I mean? And for me, the book was a letting go. It was beyond therapeutic in every way, not just with the band, but personally. It’s one of the best things I could have ever done in the time that I did. It made a difference to me personally, because it allowed me to put things down and release them once and for all and start a new chapter.
“We don’t play that many shows. We pick and choose what we want to do, and we actually talk about what we want to do. We don’t do tours, we just go, ‘Hey, where do you want to go?’ For example, we’re starting in Stockholm, and that wasn’t something that we were going to do originally, but Daron [Malakian] recommended it because he wanted to go there. And I’m like, ‘Bro, you want to go there? Let’s start there!’ He was like, ‘Really?’ and I’m like, ‘Yeah! Because my friend wants to go there!’ That’s been our attitude, and it’s been amazing. It’s more caring about what we each think as friends, rather than what a professional band is supposed to do, which was very much a turn off when we took our hiatus. Definitely for me, but I also want to say for the rest of the guys, because they’ve also admitted to that. We’re not selling widgets. We’re artists, and we want to remain that way. We want to remain careful and not over-expose ourselves so we’re picky. We play 10 to 15 shows a year now and we’re doing stadiums instead of arenas, which is mind-blowing to us. We never even thought that that would happen in our careers…”

It’s surprising to hear you say that you never expected to play stadiums – SOAD are a big deal to a lot of people, you know?
“For us, it’s insane. And it speaks volumes about people and their kids coming to shows and the generational power of music, and particularly System’s music. It really hits a nerve with people – we don’t exactly know why it does, but we’re very grateful. We disappeared for so many years for our own personal reasons, and then we reappeared, and there’s this huge demand, and we’re just shocked by it. We just want to be careful and make people happy with our performances but not overdo it.”

To your credit, you’ve always been extremely candid regarding what you need to make touring with System work your end, even if it’s not necessarily with the regularity that fans or even your bandmates want to hear…
“It’s just an industry where you put out a record and [tour] it for a year and a half to three years, that’s the common thing, right? After a while that didn’t work for me personally, and so we did the hiatus, and then all the stuff that happened thereafter. It’s nice when it’s an event and unique, something special like 2015 – the last time we were in London for the Wembley show we did it to bring attention and awareness to the 100th anniversary of the Armenian genocide. It’s nice when there’s a thought behind it, rather than putting out a record, saying, ‘Let’s go around the world,’ and then come back. Bands that are doing that are getting diminishing returns in terms of demand, and bands that are not doing that, whether by accident or voluntarily, are actually growing in terms of their clout. We just pick a handful of dates to play and enjoy each, we take our families and make it something that we really, really have fun with. And it shows. This time around it’s us having fun and bringing fun. It’s a different vibe, it’s been great and we’ve been getting a lot of awesome responses from fans at the shows that we’ve been doing this year.”

One more System question – but it’s not the one everyone asks you about recording a new album, because you must be so fed up of answering that for all these years…
“I always say, ‘Haven’t you heard it? It’s out already’ (laughs). But, you know, it’s not a bad thing when people are interested in what you do. To that extent, it’s the biggest compliment in the world. I don’t take it negatively.”

Instead of asking about an album you’ve not made, let’s go with one you have. With Toxicity turning 25 next year – a record that changed so many lives, including your own – do you see yourselves doing anything special to mark that anniversary?
“I don’t know because we’ve never really been big on birthdays of our own, let alone the records. I don’t think we even thought about the first record [1998’s self-titled debut]. It’s all about how we can put on a great show – and Daron is amazing at sequencing setlists, he does the majority of that. How do we get people rocking, and then laughing, and then dancing and then rocking again? How do we make someone go through all of the emotions that are in our songs?”

And don’t forget to pull out Roulette at Spurs Stadium for a nice gear change for the bouncing masses…
“Daron always throws that in and I never know it’s coming – I always go, ‘Oh, shit!’ And then I can see John [Dolmayan] going, ‘Okay, I get a break…’”

So, between a new solo record and more System touring, it must be exciting that you’re officially writing the first chapter of your life that’s not been covered by your memoir. Not a bad start…
“What’s interesting about the book is not just my perspective changing, it’s that you never realise just how much people now know about you. They walk up to you and say all these things, and you go, ‘Oh, shit – they know a lot about me!’ That always catches me off guard. But I have no regrets at all. I think it’s beautiful, and it’s been cathartic for me. I’m just trying my hand at different things as well. I love working on music and sharing it – as I always say, some people like pizza and some people like cordon bleu – more people eat pizza than cordon bleu but a good chef makes both, you know, so you got to do it all.”

On the topic of doing it all, where the hell is Orca Symphony Number Two? It’s been 12 years since you released part one!
“I’ve been doing a lot of symphonic works, just not a proper classical symphony, which Orca was – I got to record it with members of the Brucknerhaus orchestra in Linz, Austria. It was an amazing experience releasing that. I spoke to a classical label that asked the same question about would I want to do another symphonic work? I don't know, it's got to come to me. I'm one of those artists where I don't decide what to do – I just end up writing some piece of music, and then I look at it and go, ‘What is this?’”

It seems you’ve done incredibly well to cradle that innocent creative spark in your solo career. It’s always about what makes sense to you at any given time, even if it’s not the move people expect you to make…
“Well, I used to be in different industries, and when I started music, I felt like I was given this incredible gift to make a living off doing whatever comes to me, so I don’t ever want to question it because that would be messing up the gift.”

And so we look forward to Serj’s next solo album: a trip-hop funk disco record.
“I love trip-hop so I wouldn’t be surprised if I went for it! I mean, that’s what music is supposed to be: it’s playtime. It’s not supposed to be so serious. There are certain artists that take what they do very, very seriously, which I respect. But when people are like, ‘Aren’t you scared [of alienating fans]?’ I just say, ‘I have friends who are surgeons – their hands go into people that might end up dying, should be scared. Why would I be fucking scared? I’m writing music for God’s sake!’”

Covers, Collaborations & Collages is out now via Serjical Strike. System Of A Down return to the UK next summer.

Read this next:

• Sobriety, knick-knacks and pooping on porcelain: Life on the road with Shavo Odadjian
• Scar Power: How Daron Malakian learned to let go
• 10 bands who wouldn’t be here without System Of A Down