This is a somewhat complex issue, so please bear with me.

First, we can dispense with the idea that the tense of the first line is "just like the second". They are different and the difference is quite significant.

Whether the first line should be called "past tense" or "present tense" is more of a fussy terminological issue. There are two concepts in linguistics which have to do with how the verb relates to a timeline:

- "Tense" has to do with whether the action takes place before, during, or after whatever time would be referred to by the word "now".

- "Aspect" has to do with the temporal structure of the action itself, rather than its position relative to a "camera" placed at "now": maybe the action occurs at an indivisible point in time ("That's when I noticed the rabbit"); maybe it takes place continuously over an extended duration ("I've been reading for thirty minutes"); maybe it occurs at a large number of separate points within a continuous window ("I used to visit the donut shop every day after school")

Except I used the wrong words just now. "Tense" and "aspect" are terms from syntax, and you can determine them purely by looking at the form of the verb. The definitions I gave belong to semantics: when I said "tense", I should have said "time", and I'm not sure what the semantics-specific term for the quality related to aspect is. Anyway, we name the verb forms, "tense" and "aspect", according to whether they primarily correspond with those semantic definitions.

Except, again, there's a little more to it. We'd like to name the verb forms according to this distinction, but there is a long tradition in Latin scholarship of referring to both of those distinctions by the same name, "tense", and this bled over into English.

So we can say the following about line 1 and line 2:

- Line 1 is, semantically, focused on the present. It is making a claim about "now".

- The verb is conjugated in what would traditionally be called the "perfect tense"; according to the tense/aspect distinction described above, it is present tense (reflected in the form of have), indicating that we are talking about "now", and perfect aspect (reflected in the fact that have is used at all), indicating that the action described ("taking a toll") is already finished.

- Line 2 is semantically focused on the past. It is making a claim about some time before "now".

- The verb in line 2 is conjugated in what would traditionally be called the "simple past" or "preterite" tense. The aspect is not clear, because the English preterite tense is used for multiple different verbal semantic aspects.

The fact that line 2 is talking about the past when the rest of the chorus is talking about the present is very strange.