An unexpected lesson in narration from the late, great master of rock guitar.
Eddie Van Halen was, obvs, known for lightning-fast riffs and mastery of his combined tapping/hammer-on technique. (Sorry, my guitar-nerd is showing.) But what really made him the GOAT wasn't musical pyrotechnics, it was the way he made his guitar sing as though it were an extension of his body. And that's why for guitarists, hearing him play live was like going to school—and for fans, it was like going to church.
Van Halen was rather reticent on stage, but because he wielded his guitar as a proxy for his voice, he was capable of speaking volumes without uttering a single word. And here's where Van Halen and his Kramer 5150 can teach us a valuable lesson in storytelling.
Before we continue, you must listen to the subject of our lesson: the Van Halen classic, "Jamie's Cryin'." It's important you do this first, so I'll wait.
The lyrics of "Jamie's Cryin'" are pretty straightforward. Singer David Lee Roth tells a story about a young lady who meets a good-looking guy who wants just one thing—and it's not an evening discussing Virginia Woolf over tea and donuts. So, being the prim and proper gal she is, she turns him down and says goodnight. But now that he's gone, she longs to see him again. She even considers writing him a letter, but decides against it, knowing "what that'll get her." Because, like, dudes, right? (At least dudes in the 70s.) So now, she's sitting at home crying, hence the title of the song. Sadness ensues.
At first glance, the third-person narration seems pretty empathetic. We're a "third-person limited"on Jamie; that is, we know all her thoughts, and no one else's. We have an idea of what's going on in the dude's head, but only from Jamie's (rather astute) perspective. Although odds are pretty good that he only wants her for sex, we never hear it explicitly from him. The song seems straightforward from a narrative perspective. "Jamie's Cryin'" features a protagonist named Jamie, and her story is told in limited-third POV. Not much else going on. Right?
Not so fast.
Remember Eddie Van Halen's musical superpower: He uses his guitar like a ventriloquist's dummy while he stands quietly on stage, picking at his strings and grinning like the Cheshire Cat. With that in mind, listen to the opening again—just the first few bars before the lyrics come in. The song begins with the muscular drumming of Van Halen's brother, Alex—and then the Master himself weighs in. (You can hear the guitar isolated here.) What's Van Halen "saying" with his instrument?
If you were to describe the "tone" of Van Halen's "voice," would you say it's the equivalent of a close-third POV on Jamie? Empathetic? Kind? Sensitive to her plight? No. Rather, the long, spare, looping notes evoke a bully mocking a girl on the play yard. The three descending notes even evoke a sarcastic, wah-wah-wah!
If you were to describe the "tone" of Van Halen's "voice," would you say it's the equivalent of a close-third POV on Jamie? Empathetic? Kind? Sensitive to her plight?
Taken as a whole, this song is an example of simple but masterful storytelling. While the singer tells an ostensibly sad limited-third-person story about the sexualization of a woman longing for love, Van Halen's guitar clues us into the psychic distance of that same story. The narration does stay close on Jamie's POV, but the narrative "voice"—supplied by Van Halen's interpretive guitar work—is actually quite distant from Jamie. In fact, it is mocking and judging her. We can describe the narrative of "Jamie's Cryin'"thusly:
Protagonist: Jamie
POV: Third-person limited
Psychic distance: Far
Think about your own third-person story. Is your narrator inside the protagonist's head, yet somehow simultaneously detached from her emotionally? Does the narration give us the events from her perspective, yet tell us nothing about how she's processing those events? Or better yet—is the unnamed narrator judging her? If the answer is "yes" to any of these questions, odds are you're using a third-person limited POV while remaining psychically distant from your protagonist, just like Van Halen in "Jamie's Cryin'."
Congratulations...you're in good company.
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