This retired professor has reinvented himself - as a Taylor Swift scholar

By Angela Moore

His niece convinced him to spend his retirement analyzing Taylor Swift lyrics. Now he's a successful podcaster at 72.

After nearly 50 years in education, Jerry Coats now hosts a Taylor Swift podcast with his niece, Angela McDow.

It's Thursday and Jerry Coats is awaiting the arrival of his niece, Angela McDow. He has been preparing for days and has a stack of notes that he's ready to share.

When Angela arrives, they set up in front of Jerry's massive bookshelf, turn on the camera and ring light and record an episode of their podcast for 36,000 listeners who are waiting to hear Jerry, 72, analyze the lyrics of a Taylor Swift song.

The duo host "The Swiftie and The Scholar," a weekly podcast "exploring the lyrics, lore, and literary legacy of Taylor Swift." Jerry is the scholar.

This really isn't how he planned to spend his retirement.

After 48 years as a teacher, professor and college dean, Jerry was looking forward to traveling the world, spending time with his family and maybe teaching an adjunct course in English or history when he retired.

But Angela, 39, envisioned a bigger classroom for him. A few months into his retirement, she presented him with an idea.

A Taylor Swift fan for 20 years, Angela wanted to create a podcast with her uncle, who holds degrees in English, history, classics and literary history. In this podcast they would examine Swift's lyrics and deconstruct her songs as poems and literature.

She texted him and said she wanted to discuss a creative project with him.

"I knew she was going to try to hook me into some podcast, and I thought, 'I don't want to do this,'" Jerry told MarketWatch with a laugh.

In her PowerPoint pitch, Angela shared the lyrics to Taylor Swift's "The Lakes," a song about the pressures of fame that references the Lake District in northwest England, where Romantic poets including William and Dorothy Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey lived and wrote. For Jerry, an Anglophile with a deep love of both history and poetry, that song was the perfect choice.

The lyrics sparked a discussion about Wordsworth and the Romantic poets, which is exactly what Angela had envisioned for their podcast.

"OK, I can do that," Jerry recalled. "I thought it would be really fun, connecting important literature with Taylor Swift lyrics. I didn't realize how much was in the lyrics."

Jerry was unfamiliar with most of Swift's work. Up to that point, the chart-topping "Shake It Off" was the only Taylor Swift song he knew, out of more than 200. "I knew one song. ... I knew she was dating the football guy. I knew she was fabulously wealthy, and that was it," Jerry said. He expected the project to last a few weeks.

More than a year - and 68 episodes - later, the podcast has listeners from more than 100 countries and is available on Apple, Spotify and YouTube. The pair have also started a paid community on Patreon that allows them to bypass copyright restrictions, to let members vote on songs for upcoming episodes, and to share bonus content such as reaction videos, tours of Jerry's library, and Angela's original PowerPoint presentation. The biggest portion of their audience, 34.2%, is made up of Gen Z and young millennials ages 25 to 34, followed by 26% who are 35 to 44 and 14.7% who are 45 to 54. Their audience is 90% female.

"I was an administrator for 18 years, so it had been a while since I was consistently in the classroom. Now I feel like I'm in the classroom," Jerry said. "And the nice thing is that I'm making more money in a month than I would teaching an adjunct class."

The timing is good for a Taylor Swift-related project. The singer and songwriter recently wrapped up a record-breaking world tour, released a docuseries and an album with additional encore tracks, celebrated a high-profile wedding, wrote a song for the "Toy Story" movie franchise, and became the youngest person ever inducted into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame, to add to her numerous other awards and recognitions.

Before taping each episode, Jerry - who is referred to as "Uncle Jerry" by both his niece and podcast listeners - spends days preparing notes and research. For a recent episode analyzing the newly released song "Babylon," he brought more than 30 pages of notes. Angela brings her knowledge of Swift's music to their podcasts, and when she's off camera she spends her time on the business side of the project, as well as editing, uploading and clipping video, managing their robust online community and responding to direct messages.

Initially, Angela juggled the podcast with a full-time corporate job, but she recently resigned so she could focus on "The Swiftie and The Scholar" and other social-media projects.

"This is exactly what I wanted it to be. We've just been having a lot of fun. We have ad dollars coming in. We have Patreon subscribers coming in," Angela told MarketWatch. "I obsess over the numbers all the time, but those numbers are there because of the people and the community. That's the best marker of success - the people that have gathered around that we get to have these conversations with."

Jerry treats each song as a poem and doesn't listen to the music until after the pair has finished their analysis. During the podcast, they go through each song line by line. Jerry will point out poetic elements of the songs, explain rhythm, similes and metaphors, internal rhymes, clichés, split perspective and different types of rhyme schemes. He'll pepper the discussion with references to the Bible, classic poetry, medieval poetry, Shakespeare, literature and movies. Sometimes he speaks Latin. At the end of each episode, Jerry grades the songs on lyrical strength, narrative structure, production and atmosphere, lore and literary devices, and emotional impact.

"There's a certain type of person that, once you're out of school, you crave learning and have curiosity about the world and really want to dig into a subject," Jerry said. "And I think we hit on something there."

Many people struggle with loneliness and lack of purpose when they leave their jobs, and the effects can be profound. New research finds that loneliness and social isolation can cut almost six healthy years from a person's life. In 2023, then-U.S. surgeon general Vivek Murthy declared loneliness a public-health epidemic, saying it was as dangerous for people's health as smoking 15 cigarettes a day.

Jerry hasn't experienced boredom or loneliness yet in his retirement. Rather, his world has expanded. Less than a year ago, after getting encouragement from Angela and listeners, he started an Instagram account - one that now has more followers than Angela's. He posts mostly travel photos.

The podcast has been approached by a travel company offering to put together a "Swiftie and The Scholar" trip to the U.K. loosely based on places Jerry has traveled to and mentioned during the podcast. Angela is polling their audience to determine the level of interest.

When he and Angela began this endeavor, Jerry was skeptical of the hype around Swift and the community of her fans. He gives her work high marks across the board as poetry and has been known to say things like, "I just think that's beautiful," or "This is really good writing," after reading the verse of a song. Still, he resists calling himself a Swiftie. "I appreciate her lyrics and their literary complexity, but don't really seek out her music," he said.

But after one episode that was both emotional and academic, Jerry made what he called "an earnest plea" to listeners.

"Maybe I make it too complicated, but it's what fascinates me as an academic. ... I think about my own life when I reflect on all of these questions," he said. "So, yeah, today Taylor Swift has made me reflect on the nature of my own existence."

"She does that to me every day," Angela replied. "Welcome to the club."

-Angela Moore

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11-07-26 0900ET