‘Bold As Love’: Jimi Hendrix and his complicated relationship with sound and colour
Despite the criteria for getting into music school, reading music isn’t always an essential requirement for being an exceptional artist. Jimi Hendrix is as good a case as any—famously unable to read music, Hendrix was driven to excel by emotion and feeling, allowing his imagination to thrive on the visceral elements of seeing notes in colour. Chromesthesia isn’t uncommon in the music world, but Hendrix’s sensory approach to creativity allowed access to realms untouched by the more conventional minds.
Many musicians attempt to access such visceral, imaginative mindsets when it comes to their craft—usually, it takes a great deal of open-mindedness and a push from a drug like LSD to finally get there, but for others like Hendrix, his psychedelic experiences allowed him to blend sound and colour in a way that bred various and often contradictory sonic elements.
The convergence of sound and colour isn’t entirely chalk and cheese—it makes sense, given the spirituality of music itself. Just like basic emotions, everything has its subset of hues, and when coupled with sounds that evoke such feelings, colours can peer like a Proustian explosion of unlocked memories. For some, however, seeing colour emit from sound is as tangible as the instruments themselves, and Hendrix was able to experience these textures in his art.
Many of Hendrix’s songs point towards this neurological phenomenon, the most obvious, of course, being ‘Purple Haze’, but Hendrix applied his ability so heavily to his music that, in some cases, it’s easy to place the mind in exactly the same state he was when he put the notes together in the first place. Again, ‘Purple Haze’ would be the obvious example, but another song that emits effervescence on a larger scale is ‘Bold as Love’.
Hendrix heavily references colours throughout the song, like the “purple armour” in the first line through the “green gown sneers”, the blue “live-giving waters”, the “once happy turquoise armies”, and so on. Hendrix often described musical experiences by comparing them to music or colour, and this is the only song that seemed to tackle this illuminated essence with such overt and complicated force. The lyrical imagery allows a similar listener experience, but there’s something else there, too—something lurking in the broader arrangements that seemed like it would have created this layering on its own.
According to Leon Hendrix in Jimi Hendrix, A Brother’s Story, Hendrix was “fascinated by the connection of the seven notes in a musical scale to the seven colours of the rainbow” and purposefully filtered this into his music, because he “felt that if he couldn’t physically hold on to the music, he could at least describe it in colour and somehow make it three dimensional”.
Although a difficult venture for someone who already possessed the talent, Hendrix also knew how to allow his music to do the talking, knowing that a song like ‘Bold as Love’ would position the listener in a similar state of cognitive dissonance, even if they themselves didn’t always immediately associate such notes with primary colours. There is little out there in terms of Hendrix’s own experiences with chromesthesia, but despite the technical proficiency of his work, there always seemed to be an obvious layer of animation emitting from his music.
Maybe it’s as simple as the act of creating art itself—Hendrix’s music often tackles themes of love, heartbreak, spirituality, societal commentary, and more, covering what could be construed as the rainbow of existence with varying guitar notes and melodies that align with associated feelings and experiences. Colour can be heard in every note, every lick, and every vocalisation, providing an often complex yet mentally eye-opening experience like no other.
