Disturbed frontman David Draiman has opened up about the leap of faith behind one of the biggest songs of his career, revealing that he spent years afraid to show the softer, cleaner side of his voice — and that it took producer Kevin Churko to finally push him there. The result was Disturbed‘s soaring take on the Simon & Garfunkel classic “The Sound Of Silence“, a performance that stretched Draiman across multiple octaves and well outside his usual register.
Speaking on the “Detours & Destinations” podcast, hosted by Rabbi David Ingber, Draiman, who was raised in an Orthodox Jewish household and once seemed bound for the rabbinate before finding his way to metal, reflected on how far the cover pulled him from his comfort zone. He illustrated the point with a memory of a late friend, Linkin Park‘s Chester Bennington.
“I’ll tell you an interesting story about a dearly departed friend of mine that will illustrate your point very, very succinctly. Chester Bennington from Linkin Park. We were friends for years. I miss him very much. I’ll never forget, after I had sung our cover of ‘The Sound Of Silence‘ on ‘Conan‘, a live version for the first time, and I got all the responses from it. There was [a message] from Paul Simon himself and many others. But I remember Chester called me and he’s, like, ‘Dude, I had no idea you could sound like that. You need to do more of that.’ He was, like, ‘That needs to be your thing.’ He was so captivated by it and so caught off guard that he didn’t realize that I could go there. It really struck him. It struck me, to be honest, the first time listening back to it at the mixing console,” he said (as transcribed by Blabbermouth).
Draiman explained that the fear ran deep, dating back to an earlier attempt at a gentler sound that hadn’t gone over well with fans.
“For a long, long time, I had immersed myself in the more guttural side of delivery and the more distorted side, because that’s a style that just goes hand in hand with what Disturbed is and what rock is, and so on and so forth,” he continued. “So it sometimes doesn’t feel right not to lean into it that way. So when I first did that, I hadn’t done anything so purely sung vocally since the second record. On the second record, there’s a track called ‘Darkness‘, and if you have a second, give it a listen. It’s a beautiful song, completely acoustic, very purely and classically delivered. But during that period of time, when we put out the Believe record, which was circa 2001, 2002, it was met with a lot of backlash. People didn’t want us to do anything that wasn’t heavy. And so I was very, very concerned about showing that side of me for years. It took our producer, Kevin Churko, at the time for the Immortalized record when we did the cover to kind of give me the courage to go there and encourage me.”
He went on to make clear just how central Churko was to the song’s most recognizable moments, from the dramatic octave drop to the hushed opening.
“We tried so many different variations of the delivery of the vocal for every specific section of that song. It was Kevin‘s idea to do the octave drop. It was Kevin‘s idea to do the low whispering sort of delivery to… He’s brilliant. He doesn’t get enough of the credit that he truly, truly does deserve. I truly do owe him a debt of gratitude. We owe him a debt of gratitude. I’ve been saying this for a long time about Kevin — he was a big part of how that song came about, more than people realize.”
The gamble paid off in a way few could have predicted. Disturbed‘s studio version of “The Sound Of Silence” hit No. 1 on Billboard‘s Hard Rock and Mainstream Rock charts and became the band’s highest-charting single ever on the Hot 100, later turning up in the soundtracks for the TV series “The Blacklist” and the video game “Rock Band 4“. In May 2024, the song’s music video, uploaded in December 2015, crossed a billion views on YouTube, a first for the band. The track originally appeared on Disturbed‘s sixth album, Immortalized, released in August 2015.
The wide-ranging podcast conversation also touched on Draiman‘s outspoken public advocacy for Israel and the Jewish community, the effect of the October 7 attacks on his sense of identity, and the difficulty of navigating antisemitism and political division in the social-media age — a candid discussion, in his words, about finding one’s voice and knowing when to use it. You can watch it down below.
