DISTURBED's DAVID DRAIMAN On Decision To Quit Twitter: 'I've Said Enough'

Scotty Mars of "The Scotty Mars Show", which airs on the Live 105 radio station in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, recently conducted an interview with DISTURBED singer David Draiman. You can now listen to the chat using the SoundCloud widget below.

Commenting on his decision to quit Twitter and other social media outlets after several contentious years, Draiman said: "[I'm] free at last. Free at last. Thank God almighty. I'm free at last. [Laughs] It is beautiful."

He continued: "You know what, dude? It was great. For a few years, I really enjoyed the interaction, and it grew, and it was wonderful having that sort of insight into what, not only what my fans were thinking, but for them to have insight into what I was thinking. And it was a great relationship. But it got to be too much. What started out as just about five or ten thousand people was a hundred and fifty thousand-plus when I stopped it, and I had made the commitment to respond to everyone. When you make that commitment and you try to keep it, once it's a hundred and fifty thousand people on the page, it gets to be a little crazy. It was taking a lot of time away from my family and other things, and it was just a source more of aggravation. Because, unfortunately, you're just a very, very small fish in a very, very big pond, and you barely make a ripple. And it's, like, 'Okay, what am I doing this for exactly?' [Laughs]"

Draiman added: "Besides, there's something to be said about the mystique of the rock star, right? I mean, I've been a bigmouth long enough, for too many years. People know everything that I have to say — they know all my opinions; they're all out there already. There's nothing I can do about it. That's one of the things about the Internet: once it's said, it's out there. And I don't take any of it back — I stand by everything I've said — but it's enough. I've said enough. And now is just time for me to be what I'm meant to be.

"I really was not born into this world to be a politician; I don't have any delusions of grandeur. I'm the guy with the microphone who goes ahead and makes people feel powerful for an hour and a half; that's what I'm here to do. And as long as I'm still doing that, and making people forget about the crap that goes on in their daily lives for a little bit of time each evening that we perform, and make them leave that building feeling stronger than they did when they came in, then hopefully I'm still doing the right job."

Asked if he went through any "withdrawals" after first deleting his Twitter account, Draiman replied: "Hell no. I don't know that you can call it withdrawal… the feeling of shock with all of the extra time you suddenly have on your hands to do things and to be productive in your day that used to escape you because it was lost in this black hole called social media."

The singer went on to say that he has not completely disconnected from social media, although his involvement will be much more limited going forward. He said: "You know what, dude? We'll keep the DISTURBED Facebook page and the DISTURBED Twitter pages, and those will still stay, and we'll still pop on there from time to time. Anytime there's a post on there, 95 percent of the time, I would say, it's one of the bandmembers, and very often it's me. So we still do it, just not in that way. It's just gonna be a lot more… Every once in a while, on an occasion, and it's not gonna be so opinion-based. It's just gonna be stuff like sharing what's going on in the band and the band's life and so on and so forth."

Draiman has in the past battled with Twitter trolls who have harassed him about his sometimes-controversial views regarding Israel and its ongoing conflict with the Palestinians. Draiman has had frequent heated exchanges with followers on Twitter, some of whom believe that Israel is not blameless in the ongoing conflict with Palestinians.

Draiman, the son of Israelis and the grandson of Holocaust survivors, spent much of the last few months linking to articles by conservative and pro-Israel blogs and has often used his fame to speak out against anti-Semitism.

DISTURBED's first new album since 2011, "Immortalized", is due out August 21. The CD follows 2010's gold-certified, chart-topping "Asylum".