During an appearance on the January 23 episode of SiriusXM’s “Trunk Nation With Eddie Trunk”, SYSTEM OF A DOWN bassist Shavarsh “Shavo” Odadjian spoke about last month’s announcement that he and his bandmates added second shows as part of their one-of-a-kind massive stadium events this year. The run of 2025 North American shows will kick off at MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey on August 27-28 with special guests KORN, as well as two night at Soldier Field in Chicago (August 31-September 1) with AVENGED SEVENFOLD and a final stop at Rogers Stadium in Toronto on September 3 and September 5 with DEFTONES. Shavo said (as transcribed by BLABBERMOUTH.NET): “Literally within a few hours we sold out every show, and it was a shock to us. But I’m very glad that the stadiums were available near those dates. We had a band conference that it sold out. My manager hit us up. He’s, like, ‘Dude, you guys sold it all out.’ … It floored me. People are, like, ‘Why should it be so surprising to you?’ Everyone sees us a certain way. I still see us as that band from Hollywood. I’m not seeing us as this giant band that could sell out MetLife twice, two nights in a row. Football stadiums, bro. So, we decided, ‘Let’s add another show to each.’ And we put it out there the next day and those sold out too.”Asked why SYSTEM OF A DOWN is only playing shows in three cities this time around, Shavo said: “We haven’t played a lot together for a while. We’ve been doing one or two shows a year since 2017. So, the relationships were not as great as they are now. It’s just everybody wasn’t on the same page. We’ve been talking. Everything’s great, knock on wood. Everyone’s happy. So we decided to test the waters and play some shows. And that’s what it is. There is no strategy to it, there’s no plan to do the rest of the world just yet. I’m not saying it’s not gonna happen; I’m not saying it is gonna happen. We told each other, ‘Let’s play it by ear, do these shows, see how we feel afterwards. If we don’t wanna do any more, we don’t do any more. If we wanna do more, we’ll do more.’ There’s no heavy responsibility on anyone, because I feel like a lot of it is just thinking too much, overthinking what could happen.”Shavo continued: “Bad experiences have happened to certain people, and they kind of hold that as PTSD, I think. And now that things are better, we’re older, we’re, like, ‘Dude, no pressure, bro. Let’s just do it. If we like it, we do. If we don’t like it, we [don’t].’ ‘Cause you know what? Serj [Tankian, SYSTEM OF A DOWN vocalist] had a great time at Sick New World [festival in Las Vegas] last year. We had such an amazing, fun show and everyone left the stage hugging. And so he called back, he’s, like, ‘Dude, I loved it. Let’s do more of these.’ So that’s where that happened. We’re, like, ‘Let’s go.’ As long as everyone is down. Daron [Malakian, SYSTEM OF A DOWN guitarist] was down. So we decided, ‘Let’s test the waters. Let’s not just go full blast and start doing months. Let’s just test the waters with three shows.’ Those three shows turned to six.”Regarding why SYSTEM OF A DOWN chose to play in those three cities in particular, Shavo said: “We haven’t been there for a long time. ‘Cause we’ve been doing West Coast stuff a lot, because we haven’t been leaving the West Coast. Like I said, we’ve been kind of dipping our toe in the water, testing the temperature of the water. So, we’ve been kind of upsetting the East Coast. It seems like we don’t like going there, but we love the East Coast. We love all over. We love the entire country. It’s not personal at all. So when we decided to do some extra shows, we said, ‘We need to go to the East Coast. That’s where this year has to be.’ So that’s the reason — because we the East; we really do. We talk about it every day — John [Dolmayan, SYSTEM OF A DOWN drummer] and I talk about it every day. We’re, like, ‘We can’t wait for this.’ So we’re looking forward to seeing the crowd, being there and seeing the city and enjoying it with that eye again. We’re playing the city again. And to play two stadiums in each city is just — it’s a gift.”Asked if it is tough to ramp up a machine like SYSTEM OF A DOWN to playing at a stadium level for just six shows, Shavo said: “We can do it. Look, for the last few years, we’ve been doing one or two shows. And we go and we rehearse two weeks for one show. I think that’s not smart. So six shows is better than one show to me. I’ll take it. I’ll take it, and I’m not gonna ask for more. I want it to happen organically. I think our band is that band — we can’t be told what to do. The more we push each other to do something, the less we do. So I figure the less we push, the more we’ll do. It should be done because we wanna do it, we love to do it, and that’s why we do it.”SYSTEM OF A DOWN will also play a run of South American stadium gigs this spring. The seven-show “Wake Up! South America” tour is slated to kick off on April 24 in Bogota, Colombia at the Estadio Nemésio Camacho El Campin, followed by a show in Cercado De Lima, Peru at the Estadio Nacional. The tour will move on to Chile, Argentina and Brazil, wrapping up with a run of three shows in Curitiba, Rio De Janieiro and São Paulo. The concerts will be SYSTEM OF A DOWN’s first visit to South America since 2015.Last May, Serj spoke to the Soul Boom With Rainn Wilson podcast about his reluctance to embrace the touring lifestyle that characterized SYSTEM OF A DOWN’s early years. He said: “We’ve had incredible, unexpected success as a very far-flung kind of progressive metal band with our ‘Toxicity’ record in 2001 and touring and doing what we did. And after many years of touring, when we were making the last few records which we made together, ‘Mezmerize’ and ‘Hypnotize’ — those recordings were done at the same time, then released as two records within six months of each other in 2005 and 2006 — before those sessions, when we first started those sessions, I told the [other] guys [in the band], ‘Guys, this kind of cyclical thing that we’re doing with making records for a year, touring for two years at that time, doing all this promo publicity,’ it was just cyclical. It was, like, ‘I’ve gotta stop. And I also wanna do my own thing. I have other artistic adventures that I wanna get on.'”He continued: “Part of it was we had so much creativity and input coming into the band, specifically with Daron’s songwriting and me wanting to bring in music as well, because, over time, he became a better lyricist and I became a better musical songwriter, a better composer, so it became kind of like a push and pull, which is really good for bands, actually, ’cause it’s a yin-and-yang kind of thing — two strong, creative forces. And it also broken up so many bands. So, before ‘Mezmerize’ and ‘Hypnotize’, I basically told the guys, ‘Listen, I’d like to take a hiatus. I’m not saying I never wanna do this, but I’m saying I can’t do this right now anymore. And I wanna do my own thing and also take time off and have a life, and all of that stuff.’ It wasn’t taken well at the time. I won’t get into that. But years later, we started touring again in 2011, and it became a fun thing, ’cause it left… Nothing was totally resolved creatively, but it became a fun thing because we at least put everything to the side and said, ‘Look, we’re friends, we’re brothers. We’ve known each other for a long time. We still respect and love each other. Let’s go have fun and tour together.’ And we’ve been doing that since. Not as much as they would like, let’s say, or I’m not gonna speak for each and every person of the band, because that wouldn’t be fair of me either. But generally I’m the least person that wants to tour. Part of that is physical, because it’s tiring. I’ve done it for 20, 25 years, and I had back surgery a few years ago. I’m much better now and all of that. But part of it is that. Part of it is that it’s artistically redundant after a while, because it’s ‘Groundhog Day’; you’re repeating yourself. David Bowie said the first two weeks of every tour is basically — I’m paraphrasing — creative; after that, it’s redundant, kind of thing, which is correct. So it’s that. But I do enjoy playing with the guys, and when it’s a one-off, it’s actually fun, ’cause there’s no pressure to do this whole rigamarang of a long tour or press or anything. You just rehearse together, make your dumb jokes, have food together, and then go and play that one show and it becomes a hoorah. So that’s what we’ve been doing. And I’m grateful for that.”Tankian, who was promoting his memoir, “Down With The System”, previously addressed how his relationship with Malakian has evolved over the years, particularly as it relates to their collaborative partnership, earlier that same month in an interview with Tom Power, host of “Q” on Canada’s CBC Radio One. He said: “Well, changing the dynamic is basically years of time and the progression of the band, the success of the band, everything that happened in between the day that we met and now, basically, so 25, 30 years. A lot changes in that time. And so I think that’s a part of it.”Daron’s been a lifer and he’s incredibly serious about his music and he’s incredibly protective of his music and vulnerable due to his music,” Serj explained. “All of those things kind of go together. So it’s those things, I think, that created some of the creative differences that we started finding. And it’s also our progression. Listen, when Daron and I started working together, I didn’t really write a lot of instrumental music — I mostly wrote lyrics; I was the lyricist; I was the singer. And he didn’t write any lyrics; he just wrote music. But as time progressed and I played more musical instruments and I started becoming a songwriter/composer and he started writing more lyrics, we started kind of covering each other’s territory. And I was okay with that. If he wrote lyrics, I was trying to encourage him to write more, because I believe in artistic growth. I believe in progression. I don’t believe in things staying the same way, for music’s sake. Otherwise the music becomes the same thing over and over again. That progression is necessary in every artist’s life or in every group’s life. So I was very encouraging of that. And I just wish that I got some of that back. And so that wasn’t the case, and it was disappointing. And it became a creative difference over the band’s path, and whatnot, over time.”Asked why he wanted to write about this in his book, Serj said: “A lot of it has been publicized in a very sensationalist format by media, music media mostly, and I kind of wanted to put it in a proper perspective and grounding perspective, but with love and with balance and understanding that these things happen. This is normal. You have a relationship and you have differences in opinion as [to] how you wanna go forward, whether it’s a band or a marriage or whatever it is. And these things happen. And so I wanted to take that aspect out, I wanted to take the sensationalist aspect out of the whole thing and be, like, this is not only what happened, but this is how I see things.”Tankian also addressed the fact that SYSTEM OF A DOWN has toured intermittently since ending its hiatus in 2011, but has only managed to record two songs in the last 19 years, “Protect The Land” and “Genocidal Humanoidz”. Released in November 2020, the tracks were motivated by the conflict between Artsakh and Azerbaijan, with all proceeds supporting humanitarian efforts in SYSTEM OF A DOWN’s ancestral homeland of Armenia. Along with other donations from fans on their social pages, they raised over $600,000.”We haven’t been making new music,” Serj said. “We only put out two songs when the invasion of Artsakh, Nagorno Karabakh happened in 2020 by Azerbaijan, because we felt like the Azeri trolls, the government-sponsored trolls were taking over social media and the news networks, and the victims of these attacks weren’t getting the word out. So we became kind of obsessed with getting the word out, because we were seeing our people suffer. So we put out those two songs because of that and we donated a lot of the proceeds for that to the cause as well.”Asked how he balances the love and obligation he might feel toward his fans, those who love SYSTEM OF A DOWN, and the internal struggles within the band, Tankian said: “That’s an incredibly smart question. It’s really hard catering — when you’re an artist, it’s really hard catering. If you’re an entertainer, catering is [what you do], but if you’re an artist, then you’re just creating what comes to you. You’re almost unaware of what people want. Yes, if it’s something heavier, you know people are gonna like it more. But if you’re a good songwriter, you could do both. I do orchestral music, I do film music, I do rock music — I do it all. So I enjoy ’em all, but I know that if I do rock, more people are going to listen to it than a piano, instrumental orchestral piece of music, soundtrack kind of music. But it doesn’t mean that you don’t do both, as an artist. So it’s hard to really cater to people’s feelings. What I love is, and I know that I can speak for the rest of the guys in the band, that no matter what’s going on with our creative difference or the band not making new music or not touring fully or whatever, everyone’s incredibly appreciative of what we have in terms of the love that we get from our fans and the way that people react to our music and the way that we get all these e-mails about how it’s changed people’s lives and all of that stuff, and that is mind-blowing. It’s the biggest honor. And when I meet people on the street, I’m still incredibly honored that someone would pick me out and look at me in a positive light, not knowing who I am personally, but knowing me through my music, through our music, let’s say. And I think that’s a great fucking honor. I feel blessed for it. But it doesn’t mean that that thing should continue forever either.”