Temporal deixis
Temporal deixis is the grammar that places a moment in time relative to the speaker: most often verb tense, and alongside it the small words that fix a now, such as tonight, again, still, back then. The term comes from linguistics, where a deictic word is one that takes its meaning from when and where it is spoken. In Taylor's writing the shift usually happens inside a line or two rather than across a whole song. Enchanted opens on "There I was again tonight", crowding a past-tense verb, a word meaning this has happened before and a word meaning it is happening now into five words. But Daddy I Love Him works the other way round, arguing in the present tense from start to finish and then closing on "he was chaos, he was revelry". One was, in the final line, and the relationship the song spent its length defending has been placed in the past. A song belongs here only when the tense or the time-marker moves, and when a reading can point at what the movement does. Every song has verbs and every song has a now, so a song simply being written in the past is not the device. Where Deixis tracks who is speaking and to whom, Temporal deixis tracks when the speaking happens relative to what is spoken about. Similarly, Non-chronological narrative concerns the order in which a story's episodes are arranged, while Temporal deixis concerns the grammar that locates each moment as it passes. Songs often carry both, because the grammar is frequently the evidence a listener uses to reconstruct the order.
Moving the tense inside a line collapses the distance between the moment being described and the moment of describing it, so the listener meets a speaker caught between the two rather than one reporting safely from afterwards. The effect is a tension inside the sentence itself: the event is finished and still going on, and the grammar will not settle. The small time-markers work by ambush instead. A single again or still can reveal that what sounds like a first occasion is a repetition, or that something announced as over is quietly continuing. Because the technique works on verbs and adverbs rather than images, it tends to be felt before it is noticed. It often carries an argument the song never states outright, usually about whether the speaker has finished with what she is describing.
Appears in 8 songs
“You paint me a blue sky, then go back and turn it to rain / I lived in your chess game”
Uncle Jerry builds a three-position model out of the verb tenses. There is the present narrator, writing the letter now; the post-present narrator, older again, looking back at the one doing the writing; and the pre-present narrator, the past narrator who is remembering the events as they are recounted. The song moves between all three without announcing it, so "you paint me a blue sky" sits in the present and "I lived in your chess game" drops back a layer in the next breath. The letter becomes a place where three versions of the same woman are speaking at once.
“Running wild, it's been a long time”
Uncle Jerry reads the line as a juxtaposition of verb forms rather than of images. "Running wild" is a continuous present, so the children are still going; "it's been a long time" looks back from a distance at which they long ago stopped. One line holds the childhood open and closes it. He returns to the grammar on "I remembered I loved you", asking why the verb sits in the past when the feeling has not ended, and locates the sadness of the song in that choice rather than in anything the speaker states.
“I had a bad habit Of missing lovers past”
The poem opens in a tense that has already closed itself: "I had a bad habit of missing lovers past", where the habit is over before the sentence ends and "lovers past" folds a further layer of pastness into its object. Uncle Jerry marks the pluperfect specifically, the past standing behind the past, and reads the grammar as the speaker putting distance between herself and the pattern she is describing. The turn to the present, when the opalite sky arrives, is a change of tense before it is a change of subject.
“He was chaos, he was revelry”
Uncle Jerry stops on the verb in the song's final line: "notice the 'was' shifts the tense to past tense." What makes it strange is that nothing else in the song agrees with it. The boy is present tense throughout, the one she wants; so is the speaker, dancing in her dress in the sun and calling herself his lady. Then the last line puts the relationship in the past. Uncle Jerry does not settle the contradiction. He first hears the ending as something closer to a prayer for her future, which leaves past-tense grammar doing forward-looking work, and comes back to it when the episode is weighing two accounts of who the song is about, offering that one is over as slight support for the reading in which a relationship has already ended before the final verse. He concedes at once that it may simply be ambiguous.
“Now I'm waiting by the phone / I'm never gonna love again”
Uncle Jerry walks the song's verbs and finds a before, a during and an after built into them. The tennis court that was covered up puts the meeting in the past; "now I'm waiting by the phone" pulls the speaker into the present; "I'm never gonna love again" throws her forward into a future she has already decided on. The last of the three is a promise rather than a report, so the song closes by predicting itself.
“I never needed anything more / But I can see us lost in the memory”
The song's grammar changes vantage point before its story does. "I never needed anything more" sits in the past and is finished with; "but I can see us lost in the memory", opening the chorus, is present and still happening. Uncle Jerry treats the shift as the moment the song reveals where it is being spoken from, because a speaker who can still see it is not the speaker who lived it. The present tense here belongs to the remembering rather than to the summer, which is how the song manages to be nostalgic and ongoing at the same time.
“There I was again tonight”
Uncle Jerry hears grammatical tension in the song's opening line. "I was" is past tense, "again" reports that the speaker has stood here before, and "tonight" drops her back into the present, so three time positions crowd into five words before a single image arrives. He treats the conflation of past and present as the reason the opening works, registering as unease a beat before a listener could say why. The same manipulation returns later, where "this is me praying" sits in the present and the next line answers it with "this was the very first page", pulling the speaker out of the now she has just claimed.
“But I knew you”
Uncle Jerry marks the chorus as a grammatical drop: "notice the slip to past tense." The song moves back and forth between the speaker's then and her now, and the chorus, arriving each time on the same four words, is where it settles into a knowing that is finished. The verb is not "know" and never becomes it, so the refrain the song is built on is also the place it concedes that the relationship is over.