Gary Holt (Exodus/Slayer) says he loves Taylor Swift

Born in San Pablo, California back in 1964, Gary Holt started his musical career in 1981, first achieving fame as the guitarist, bandleader and main songwriter of the Thrash Metal band Exodus. But in 2011 he joined Slayer in 2011 temporarily, as a replacement for Jeff Hanneman but eventually became a permanent member after Jeff’s death in 2013.

So Holt was always involved with heavy music but as he told Scandalous Podcast (Transcribed by Ultimate Guitar), he always loved Pop music, including Taylor Swift.

Gary Holt (Exodus/Slayer) says he loves Taylor Swift

“I love Taylor Swift. Why all the hate? She’s an extraordinarily hard worker. She’s super fu**ing nice to everybody, and people hate her. She’s just the biggest pop star on Earth, and more power to her. I like the songs. I love pop. I listen to pop mostly in the car, you know, I don’t listen to metal [while driving]. I just recently started exploring my Sirius subscription [laughs]. Okay, you know, there’s some heavy sh*t on here, but I’d rather listen to George Michael myself.”

“Beyoncé will put out a song and there’s 30 fu**ing people on it. How can 30 people write a song, all gathered together? It’s like, you’re not a song, right? Beyoncé… some of these other people require massive teams. It’s just like a factory of songwriting. Who even knows who did what anymore, when there are like 20 names on it… I don’t know, but yeah, I got no hate for Taylor.”

He continued:

“She’s a good person on top of anything else, not that I know her, but hey, she tipped off the truck drivers 100 grand… Beyoncé, what are you tipping your drivers? Probably nothing. I don’t know. Maybe she’s super generous. I think Beyonce is the most overrated talent on Earth. I think she’s marginally talented.”

“I’m not a Swiftie, but when ‘Trouble’ comes on the radio, I don’t change it. It’s alright. I like it. I like pop music. Always have, though, even back in the ‘Bonded by Blood’ era. I’d be out on tour with Venom, and I’d be drunk at the bar, singing every word to Madonna’s ‘Angel’. And Cronos was shaking his head, like, ‘What’s wrong with this guy?’ But I’ve always liked pop music,” Gary Holt said.

The Rolling Stones already had once the highest-grossing tour of all time (“A Bigger Bang Tour” – 2005 to 2007). Since then many other artists have had more profitable tours than that one and one of them is Taylor Swift. Nowadays, she has the most profitable tour of all time, which is called “The Eras Tour”. With 60 dates from 2023 to 2024, the tour made more than 1 billion and 39 million dollars.

Until now she released 11 studio records, 5 EPs and four re-recorded albums of her discography. She is currently the solo artist with the most weeks at number one on the United States Billboard 200 chart. In 2023 she was the most streamed artist in Spotify, with 26.1 billion streams.