# Precious Time > **One-line reading.** The moment the running stops working. Not the flood's arrival but its recognition — the speaker finds depth, breath, and time only from *inside* the water, already waist-deep, while the song's own looping form spends the very time it mourns. > [!info] Album & credits > **Album:** *Subject to Flooding* (2018) — **track 12 of 13**, the penultimate song, right before the closer [[Shine]] · 3:12 > **Written by** Roy English, Matt Pauling, and Sarah Vaughan *(the Vaughan credit is a sampled spoken recording — see below — not co-written lyrics)* · **Produced by** Roy English & Matt Pauling · **Mixed by** Adam Hawkins · **Mastered by** Chris Gehringer · **Executive producer** S1 > **Full lyrics:** [Genius](https://genius.com) · streaming > **▶ Listen:** [Official audio (YouTube)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JnyQm8fPaM8) The album's deepest submersion — track 12 of 13, positioned so the last light in *Subject to Flooding* has to be *chosen*. Everywhere else on the record the water is a feeling: shame, poverty, fame, false friends. Here the water turns out to be **time itself**, and the song is the moment the speaker stops swimming and looks down. ## At a glance - **Era / release** — *Subject to Flooding*, Jagwar Twin's 2018 debut. This is the Roy English register *before* any persona: no [[Sir Lucius]], no Circus, no mask. Just a first-person voice, waist-deep. - **In one line** — a drowning clock; the album's flood run as *time*, discovered too late to outrun. - **Who speaks** — Roy, first-person, who at one marked moment widens the "I" outward to *the people* (a collective history of loss). A third presence haunts the track without a line: **Sarah Vaughan**, sampled. - **Key symbols** — [[The Prop Room#Water|Water]] / time (the fusion) · [[The Prop Room#Heaven's Gate|Heaven's Gate]] (salvation as a locked door) · the stockpile · [[The Prop Room#Blood|Blood]] (inheritance) · the ticking clock. ## The song, mapped *Precious Time* is radically repetitive, and the repetition is the whole argument: a song about wasting time spends most of its runtime looping the same lines. Rather than an arc, it's a loop — and that's the point. Following its own moves: | Move | In the song | What it does | |---|---|---| | **1 · The thesis** | *"we never see our depth till we're underwater / and we never need our breath till we're underwater"* | States the retrospective law: depth and breath only become visible from *inside* the water. Backward-looking by grammar — *till we're*, never *before*. Returns **three times**. | | **2 · The diagnosis** | *"we know we can't change / nobody else"* (in blocks of four) + *"I know I'm / wasting precious time"* | Paralysis and isolation, hammered. The line break is a fork the song won't resolve (see below). The "nobody else" runs pile up — the form starts spending the time it mourns. | | **3 · Two failed grabs** | *"stocked up for the day, ready or not"* · *"walked up Heaven's gate, picking the lock"* — each tagged *"precious time on your mind"* | Two attempts to *control* time by force: hoard it, or burgle the gate early. Structurally paired, both conceding failure. | | **4 · The widening** | *"(the people)"* → *"shot like buffalo out on the plains … 'lot like Navajo blood in the veins"* | The one structural pivot: the pronoun opens from personal *I / your* to a collective, historical register before folding back. | | **5 · The hardening** | the refrain returns; one instance becomes *"there's nobody else"* | The verdict tips. Not "we can't change other people" but "no one is coming." | | **6 · Dissolution** | *"ya / wasting precious time"* ×3, fading | No resolution, no rescue. The loop just runs down. | The hinge is that *"(the people)"* tag — the only place the song leaves the "I" — and the fusion line is the spine: **"time tickin and your head goin underwater / waist deep, wasting time."** Time is doing what water does. ## What it means A few claims that cut across the whole loop. **It's a noticing, not a climax.** There is no arrival event in the lyric — no wave hits, nothing breaks. The speaker is *already* waist-deep, the head *already* going under. So this isn't where the flood strikes; it's where the album's momentum-doctrine — [[Hell Of A Night]]'s *outrun it* — stops working long enough for the submersion to become **conscious**. Elsewhere on the record a climax happens *to* Roy. Here he simply looks down and sees he's been drowning the whole time. **Time is the flood.** The title says *time*, but the lyric makes time behave like water — ticking, rising, submerging, wasting — and fuses them outright in one line. So the album's deluge isn't only emotional; underneath, it's **temporality itself**: underwater in time, submerged in the awareness that a life is being spent. This is the track where the record's title-metaphor and its clock turn out to be the same object (see [[Subject to Flooding]], [[Concepts/Machine vs Human]]). **The line break is a fork — and the song keeps both tines.** *"We know we can't change / nobody else"* reads two ways depending on where you stop. Run it on: *"we can't change nobody else"* — **accountability**, you cannot change other people, only your own time is yours to spend or waste. Stop it dead: *"we can't change." / "Nobody else."* — **fatalism plus isolation**, locked in the pattern, and no one is coming. The relentless repetition lets both run *simultaneously*; the outro's *"there's nobody else"* is what finally tips the scale toward verdict. Don't resolve the ambiguity — it *is* the mechanism. **Two strategies against time, both burglaries.** *Stocked up for the day, ready or not* and *walked up Heaven's gate, picking the lock* are two ways to seize time by action — stockpile it, or force the gate before you're let in. Both are **seizure-logic**, the same outlaw grammar as [[Hell of a Night Pt. 2 (The Hallelujah Stickup)]]'s stickup, now extended from money and joy to *salvation* and *time*. Grace gets replaced by prepping and burglary — and the lyric knows neither works: *ready or not* concedes defeat in advance, because the day arrives on its own schedule regardless of the hoard. **The form enacts the wasting.** Most pointedly, a song *about* wasting time loops identical "nobody else" blocks for most of its length. The structure performs the squandering it describes — you don't just hear about spent time, you're made to live through it. (A kinship of *device* with [[LOOP]]'s repeated-word intro, not a cross-song callback.) **The widening does honest work either way.** The parenthetical *"(the people)"* is a deliberate, grounded pivot from one wasted life to peoples and histories. *That* the scope opens is certain — the tag sits right there in the text. *What* the buffalo/Navajo couplet means is deliberately left open (see the note below): the personal clock joins collective histories of loss regardless of how you read the image, so the move lands even while the meaning stays unsettled. ## Characters - **[[Roy]]** — first-person, pre-persona. This is 2018; there is no [[Sir Lucius]] here (he doesn't surface until 2023). The voice is Roy in the debut register, unmediated. - **"The people"** — not a named character but a deliberate pronoun-shift, the collective the song opens into at the *"(the people)"* marker: a history of loss larger than one drowning life. - **[Sarah Vaughan](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarah_Vaughan)** — present not as a character in the words but as a *ghost in the track*. Her 1957 spoken banter is sampled into the song: a dead performer's recorded, living room-talk — old, spent time — preserved inside a song literally called *Precious Time*. ## Artifacts **FLOOD ARTIFACT (霊的な愛)** · `B1034` — The footage is a sustained gaze down into hazy water, and Precious Time's repeated hook is literally about that vantage: "Cause we never see our depth till we're underwater... Time tickin and your head goin… → [[Artifacts - Ciphers and Code-Series|analysis]] · [gallery ↗](https://mirrors.jagwartwin.com/gallery) <video src="https://storage.googleapis.com/jagwar-twin-33.appspot.com/artifacts/0x1a28d145a6627c02c9fe073c4015c32a22002eafe0c2c4cdda9d7346e47811fd..mp4" poster="https://storage.googleapis.com/jagwar-twin-33.appspot.com/artifacts/0x1a28d145a6627c02c9fe073c4015c32a22002eafe0c2c4cdda9d7346e47811fd..jpg" width="240" controls preload="none"></video> ## Symbols - **[[The Prop Room#Water|Water]] / time** — the fusion at the center: the title says time, the lyric makes it rise, tick, submerge, and waste. Depth and breath are available only from *inside* the water. - ***Waist deep, wasting time*** — a homophone (**waist / waste**) welding depth-of-submersion to squandering: waist-deep in water, waste-deep in spent time. Framed as the *text's* pun — Roy is a documented homophone-player elsewhere (Sun/Son, prophets/profits, El Roy/El Roi), so the device is in-character, but this stays the text's play, not an asserted intention. - **[[The Prop Room#Heaven's Gate|Heaven's Gate]] / picking the lock** — salvation reframed as a locked door to be burgled; grace swapped for breaking-and-entering. (One node in the catalogue's wider door/gate imagery — kin to [[Pay Attention (feat. little luna)|Pay Attention]]'s *Door*, [[I Like to Party]]'s *lock up your door*, [[Another Way II Heaven]]'s *I opened up a Door*.) - **The stockpile** — *stocked up for the day*; hoarding against time, prepping as the other doomed control-strategy. - **The clock / *time tickin*** — the ticking a public interview once paired with [[Happy Face]]'s "time bomb"; Roy reframed the ticking away from literal death, toward *a cycle* (see Source notes). - **[[The Prop Room#Blood|Blood]] (Navajo blood in the veins)** — blood as *inheritance*, carrier-of-history; the terminal beat of the album's blood-imagery escalation. Guarded: **no ancestry claim** (see below). - **Buffalo on the plains** — mass slaughter, collective historical loss — evoked; meaning held open. - **Baptism, inverted** — submersion that *reveals* truth without *cleansing* it: more drowning than rebirth, redemption deferred one track to [[Shine]]. ## Connected songs - **[[Subject to Flooding]]** *(album / title track)* — the title metaphor and the clock revealed as the *same thing*. Time is the flood. - **[[Hell Of A Night]]** — the momentum-doctrine (*outrun it*) that **failed**; *Precious Time* is where the running stops working. - **[[Hell of a Night Pt. 2 (The Hallelujah Stickup)]]** — the seizure-logic / outlaw grammar, extended here from money and joy to salvation and time. - **[[Shine]]** — the very next track and the immediate answer: recognition gives way to dawn. *Shine* chooses light but doesn't cancel the water — and its hope reads as *chosen, not casual* precisely because *Precious Time* made the crisis as large as death. - **[[Dream - Dream]]** *(track 2)* — the shared source: one 1957 Sarah Vaughan recording feeds **both** tracks. *Dream / Dream* takes the *song*; *Precious Time* takes the *speech* before it — one night's music and talk split across the album's two halves (see [[Concepts/Inherited Substrate]]). - **[[It's Your Time]]** *(33, 2022)* — the *other* "Time" song, and its opposite charge: kairos, the seized moment (*all my life I've been waiting for this*) against *Precious Time*'s awakening-too-late. Same noun, inverted polarity — panic vs. arrival. - **[[All My Friends]]** *(2023 single)* — *no time left on the clock*: a game-clock, kin in *theme* across eras (winning collapses when the game ends), not a callback. - **[[Superhuman]]** — an album-sibling on the inherited-substrate axis (its own sampled voice) and the *blood-on-our-knees* strand of the blood census. ## The Vaughan sample — someone else's spent time The third writing credit is the strange, wonderful one. **Sarah Vaughan** is credited not because the song borrows her melody or words but because it *samples her voice* — specifically, by ear, the spoken banter she does *before* she sings, lifted from a 1957 live recording of "Dream." So a song called *Precious Time* opens a window into a captured, recorded moment of *another* performer's spent time: a dead woman's living, off-hand room-talk, preserved. The lovely structural fact: the **same 1957 performance** feeds two different songs on this album. [[Dream - Dream]] (track 2) takes the *song* she sang; *Precious Time* (track 12) takes the *talk* before it. One night, split down the middle and stationed at either end of the record — music in the first half, speech in the last. It's a small, exact instance of the album's method of building new work on inherited material (see [[Concepts/Inherited Substrate]]). The credit itself is grounded (it's in the released credits); the by-ear identification of the source recording is a strong reading pending a close listen for exactly where the banter sits in the mix. ## Lyrics ``` Cause we never see our depth till we're underwater And we never need our breathe till we're underwater Time tickin and your head goin underwater Waist deep, wasting time We know we cant change Nobody else Nobody else Nobody else Nobody else I know I'm Wasting precious time Nobody else Nobody else Nobody else Nobody else I know I'm Wasting precious time Walked up Heaven's gate Picking the lock Precious time on your mind Stocked up for the day Ready or not Precious time on your mind Cause we never see our depth till we're underwater And we never need our breathe till we're underwater Time tickin and your head goin underwater Waist deep, wasting time We know we cant change Nobody else Nobody else Nobody else Nobody else I know I'm Wasting precious time Nobody else Nobody else Nobody else Nobody else I know I'm Wasting precious time (The people) Shot like buffalo out on the plains Precious time on your mind 'Lot like Navajo blood in the veins Precious time on your mind Cause we never see our depth till we're underwater And we never need our breathe till we're underwater Time tickin and your head goin underwater Waist deep, wasting time We know we cant change Nobody else Nobody else Nobody else Nobody else I know I'm Wasting precious time Nobody else There's nobody else Nobody else Nobody else Nobody else I know I'm Wasting precious time Ya Wasting precious time Wasting precious time Wasting precious time ``` ## Source notes - **Grounded (released music, verified credits, public interviews and posts).** The album, track position (12 of 13, penultimate, before *Shine*), runtime, and the writer/producer credits, including the Sarah Vaughan sampled-audio credit and the notable **Adam Hawkins** mix (one of only two exceptions on an album mixed mostly by someone else). The lyric text itself — the thesis, the fused *time / underwater* line, the doubled *nobody else* refrain and its outro sharpening to *there's nobody else*, the two control-strategy couplets, and the *"(the people)"* widening marker. In the one interview to *name* the song, a host groups *Happy Face* and *Precious Time* as songs that "touch on death / a ticking time bomb," and Roy softens the "death" frame — *"I don't know if it's specifically death, it's more like a cycle…"* — though his answer then develops the *Happy Face* material rather than this song. And a documented biographical detail bears on the couplet: Roy has said his mother listened to "pretty much only weird world music… Native American flute music," a real inherited sound-world in the household. - **Public paratext.** In Jagwar Twin's own Discord (July 2025, at the height of the Lucius era), a community member named *Precious Time* among their personal top-three deep cuts, and Roy was present and engaging the thread — a small sign the song still lives for the fanbase years on. *(Attribution note: Roy's warm "very deep cut, still one of my favorites" reply in that thread was about a **different** song, *"Worldstop"*, not this one — so the citable fact is the fan's naming and Roy's presence, not Roy praising Precious Time.)* - **Strong readings.** *Recognition, not climax*; *time is the flood*; the two burglaries as seizure-logic kin to Pt. 2; the form-enacts-the-wasting device; the inverted baptism; the panic-vs-kairos diptych with *It's Your Time*. Grounded in the material, but interpretive — held as readings, not facts. - **Held open.** The buffalo/Navajo couplet — metaphor, lament, inherited sound-world, or sonic image — stays unresolved, and makes **no** claim about Roy's ancestry or ethnicity; the safest route is *music-in-the-blood* via the mother's records (below), not lineage. Whether *Subject to Flooding* is primarily emotional, spiritual, or temporal overwhelm is an album-level question this song sharpens but doesn't settle. And a quote sometimes attributed to a 2020 interview — that the song is "about the time we have now moved into," framing it as prophetic of that year — has **not** been verified against the primary and should be treated as a lead, not a fact, until confirmed. No official video, live clip, or dedicated post about the song has surfaced. > [!note]- Advanced reading — the grounded re-route for the Navajo/buffalo couplet > The couplet is the single most careful line on this song, because the temptation to over-read it into a heritage claim is real and this guide firewalls it hard: **make no claim about Roy's ancestry.** > > The *safest* reading routes through a documented channel rather than lineage. Roy has said (2018) that his mother listened almost exclusively to "weird world music… Celtic chants… amazing African drumming, **Native American flute music**." That's a real, inherited *sound-world* — so the couplet reads most defensibly as **music-in-the-blood**: an inherited sonic inheritance transmitted through the household, folded into the album's larger method of building on inherited material. Two disciplines hold this in check: "Native American flute music" is *broad*, not "Navajo" specifically, so it supports an Indigenous-*coded* sound-world in the home, not a Navajo-ancestry claim; and the mother-as-musical-source stays ordinary biography here — an ordinary record collection, nothing more. > > Structurally, the couplet also caps the album's **blood census** — blood escalating across the record from solidarity (*all of us bleed*) to cost (*blood on our knees*) to shared struggle to violence, landing finally on blood as **inheritance / carrier-of-history**. That's album-local texture, not a cross-era thread. > [!note]- Advanced reading — the album's moral crisis, and why *Shine* has to choose > The load-bearing sequencing argument: *Precious Time* isn't merely the album's low point, it's its **moral crisis** — the hinge where the personal story (poverty, shame, fame, false friends) widens into the historical and existential (mortality, mass death, time itself). Track 12 is deliberately positioned as the deepest submersion so that the closer, [[Shine]] (track 13), reads as *chosen* light rather than casual optimism. You can only earn a sunrise that large by first making the dark that large. The *"(the people)"* pivot is where the album buys that scale — one wasted life joining collective histories of loss, right before the record turns toward dawn. > [!note]- Advanced reading — the symbolic coordinates (how this guide files this song) > In this guide's cross-song symbolic grid, *Precious Time* sits at a specific set of coordinates: **lunar** in pole, **nigredo** in transformation-phase (the alchemical blackening — dissolution before any gold), **loop** in recursion-state, and **approaching** at the threshold. Narrative voice: Roy. Active symbol: the **Moon**. Read together, these place the song exactly where the reading puts it — a lunar, reflective, *looping* descent that is *approaching* a threshold it hasn't yet crossed. The nigredo framing is why the drowning reveals without cleansing: this is the blackening, and *Shine* is the light on the far side of it. (This is this guide's interpretive coordinate system, a way of filing the song's mood and motion — not a claim about authorial intent.) > [!note]- Advanced reading — how this reading could be wrong (the anti-totalization net) > Kept honest, three ways the big claims could be overreach: > - **The flatter read.** *"We never see our depth till we're underwater… we can't change"* is a fairly *universal* mortality meditation — we don't value things until we're drowning; time is precious. The grand "time IS the flood, the whole album's deluge run as temporality" is an album-level cosmology *imposed* on a reflective song. If *Precious Time* is simply a sincere mortality reflection, the time=flood cosmology and the seizure-logic are overlay — and, tellingly, **the one genuinely grounded find here (the Vaughan-banter sample feeding two tracks) needs none of it.** That's the falsifier worth keeping in view. > - **Form-mirrors-content is cheap.** "The looping refrain spends the time the song mourns" is elegant, but the same move is available for *any* repetitive song (and any long song "enacts" duration). Hold it as a nice observation, not as evidence. > - **The Protector-everywhere risk.** Reading *picking the lock / stocked up* as seizure-logic extends the album's Protector/seizure architecture onto one more track — and at some point *every* song on the record becomes the same mechanism. Grant that hoard-and-break-in imagery can just be imagery. ## Read next - [[Shine]] — the very next track; the dawn that has to be chosen after this drowning. - [[Subject to Flooding]] — the album, and the flood-as-time argument in full. - [[Dream - Dream]] — the album's *other* Vaughan track; the song to this one's speech. - [[It's Your Time]] — the opposite pole: the seized moment against the wasted one. - [[Hell of a Night Pt. 2 (The Hallelujah Stickup)]] — the seizure-logic this song inherits. - [[Concepts/Inherited Substrate]] — the method behind the sampled voice.