Can't it? Why not? What's wrong with it?
> The line in question, She said goodbye too many times before, stands out like a sore thumb for being preceded and followed by sentences that, unlike it, are both in the present tense.
But it's a song. Prosody can't be held to the same strict rules of tense consistency (or other grammatical rules) as prose. And flipping tenses between lines is hardly an uncommon feature of songwriting. Take, for example, Leonard Cohen's "Boogie Street":
A sip of wine, a cigarette,
And then it's time to go,
I tidied up the kitchenette,
I tuned the old Banjo.
I'm wanted at the traffic jam
and so on.
