More than a decade after Disturbed stunned the rock world with its haunting cover of The Sound of Silence, frontman David Draiman has revealed the producer he credits with helping unlock the performance that would become one of the band’s defining moments.
Speaking on the Detours & Destinations podcast, Draiman reflected on recording the Simon & Garfunkel classic, admitting he was initially hesitant to lean into the cleaner vocal style that ultimately made the song so memorable.
“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,” Draiman explained (per Blabbermouth).
He admitted that previous attempts to showcase a softer side of his voice had been met with resistance from fans, pointing to the acoustic track Darkness from the band’s Believe album:
“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.”
Disturbed ‘Darkness’
Embracing a different approach
According to Draiman, it was producer Kevin Churko who convinced him to embrace a different approach during sessions for 2015’s Immortalized.
“It took our producer, Kevin Churko… to kind of give me the courage to go there and encourage me.”
Draiman went on to praise Churko’s creative influence, revealing that several of the song’s most recognisable moments, including the dramatic octave shift and whispered vocal passages, came directly from the producer’s ideas.
“It was Kevin’s idea to do the octave drop. It was Kevin’s idea to do the low whispering sort of delivery… He’s brilliant. He doesn’t get enough of the credit that he truly, truly does deserve.”
The Disturbed vocalist also shared a personal memory involving his late friend Chester Bennington, who reached out after seeing the band’s live performance of the song on Conan.
“Dude, I had no idea you could sound like that. You need to do more of that,” Draiman recalled Bennington telling him.
Released on Immortalized in 2015, The Sound of Silence became Disturbed’s biggest crossover hit, topping rock charts, reaching new audiences around the world and earning more than one billion views on YouTube.
More than ten years later, Draiman says the performance almost never happened the way fans know it today without Churko’s encouragement.
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