During a recent interview with Lilian Tahmasian, drummer John Dolmayan opened up about System of a Down’s writing process. While it has been years since the band has released any new material, Dolmayan explained that the songwriting process could sometimes get complicated.
“There’s a lot of pressure on me when the songs come in. Okay, so let’s say Daron [Malakian] writes a song. Sometimes, it’s years before he brings it to us. At the very least, I don’t think there’s anything he brought into System that was less than six months,” he said.
“So he’s had all this time to think about what it’s going to sound like and all these things, and then pretty much nothing happens until I put drums on it. And if I don’t like the drums, it’s very unlikely that song’s going to end up on an album.”
“He’ll play me the song. It’ll be, well, the way we used to do. We haven’t made a record in a long time – but Daron would be in front of me, and then Shavo [Odadjian] and Serj [Tankian] on one side, and he would play us the song, and we’d just listen. I’d be sitting on my drum set while he’s playing the song.”
Dolmayan continued: “Sometimes he’d have a melody, sometimes he wouldn’t, sometimes there’d be lyrics, sometimes not, but the melody of the song is what I was listening to. So while he’s playing it, I’m thinking about what is going to work on that.”
“Almost immediately, the first things that come to mind, I would throw away. Because if it’s the first thing that comes to my mind, it might be the first thing that comes to somebody else’s mind, and I don’t want my drumming to sound like that.”
“So then I would be like, ‘Okay, I’m not going to do that, because that’s the first thing and the easiest thing, I’m not going to take the easy path.’ Then I’d be like, ‘Well, what doesn’t fit? How do I make it fit? Can it fit?’ And that’s kind of how we did it.”
Dolmayan went on to explain how he got the idea for the drum part on the song “Toxicity,” admitting it came after getting frustrated by his bandmate.
“Sometimes the guys would have ideas like, for example, ‘Toxicity,’ which is a song initially brought in by Shavo, and then Daron had another part to another song, and they kind of went home, put them together, and like, two months later they brought it back. I was trying to figure out a beat for it because it was better. It felt like it had something,” he said.
“I couldn’t think of anything. And then Shavo was like, ‘Well, why don’t you do this?’ I was like, ‘Shavo, let me go through my process here.’ But he kept irritating me. So I was like, ‘Whoa! Like this!?’ And then that was the beat. He goes, ‘Yeah, like that,’ and that was the beat. It came out of nowhere.”
“I didn’t even think about it, I just did something because he was irritating me and I was mimicking him. I don’t even think he wanted that. He later said, ‘Yeah, that’s what I meant.’ Sure, it’s what you meant. But it can come from nowhere. But that’s it, that’s the song now, and I would say that’s what I’m most highly regarded for, the beat for that song, which was completely a mistake.”
