Shavo Odadjian

“When I moved from Armenia to L.A., I moved to North Kingsley Drive. That was my street, that's where I grew up and I saw everything there. I started skateboarding there. I witnessed homelessness, the poor, you know, I noticed gangs. I learned about friendship.”

“I've always questioned death and birth and life. Where do we go? Are we here now? Or is this just one of the lives that we live?”

“I don't want every member of System to have their own label. It will be like a circus.”

“I'm not a giant rock star. I play one on TV, though.”

“When I was a kid, I used to make skateboarding videos, and I would pretend to be in a band and make rock videos that I'd edit with two VCRs.”

“I listen to a lot of Eighties hip-hop. I listened to a lot of Ice-T.”

“So the universe is the sacred silence and sleep, and the kids are the disorder. So how do you control the disorder in that universe? You can't. To me, that's 'Toxicity.'”

“Rock's not dead.”

“I haven't sold one painting. I have either given them as gifts or just kept them. It's like babies you know. It's, like, hard to sell a baby.”

“RZA helped me make my first beat, and he rhymed over it, and that made the 'Babylon A.D.' soundtrack. That first track was very raw and unmixable, but it's so anthemic. After that, I started learning how to make tracks. It was a process, but once you stop learning you're dead.”

“When you open for a band, you don't play one of their songs. You just don't do that.”

“I've been so hesitant to do anything else besides System because you know, when you do something grand and it's noticed so much, everything else you do is secondary.”

“I'm kind of right in the middle - I'm an Independent, not far Left or far Right. But I don't think everyone needs to know about that, do they?”

“When I hear a song, I close my eyes and see a lot of stuff happen, and I love making those visuals come to life. It's always been a passion.”

“System of a Down is my lifeline. It'll never go away.”

“I've been a fan of Bad Brains ever since I can remember. They are iconic pioneers of punk, not just the music but the attitude.”

“I always thought when I was 22 something bomb was gonna happen, then when I was 22, System started blowing up in like '96. Not blowing up really, but I started putting it into fruition. '96 is when people started noticing us, then '97 was when we got signed.”

“Well here's how I look at it, I've always been someone that's liked to have things on my plate, it just keeps me going.”

“We don't preach, but we just tell you what we think, and it provokes thought.”

“When I listen to a band like Pink Floyd, I don't know the names of the individual songs, I know the full albums. That's what we want for our albums.”