Jimi Hendrix

"Bold as Love" is the title track to Axis: Bold as Love, second album by the Jimi Hendrix Experience. The song, which closes the album, was written by Jimi Hendrix and produced by band manager Chas Chandler. Hendrix biographer Harry Shapiro describes the theme of "Bold as Love" as being "an Olympian battle of passions whose strategy is mapped out ... self-evidently in colours", noting in relation to the lyrics that "The conclusion has to be that love comes in many hues, love is hard work and to get properly involved takes commitment and courage". AllMusic writer Denise Sullivan explains in a similar way that the song "outlines a rainbow in an epic declaration of love in its many colours", proposing that "One interpretation may be that people are one, despite our different shades; another may be that in all persons there resides an array of emotions, each corresponding to a color" and concluding that "In either case, complete integration is Hendrix's ideal". The practice of using colours as lyrical metaphors has been compared to fellow Axis: Bold as Love track "One Rainy Wish" and Are You Experienced number "Love or Confusion". Speaking with regard to the musical content, BBC review writer Chris Jones has noted that "Bold as Love" uses "the first flowerings of phasing to make Jimi [Hendrix]'s Strat sound more like a whole orchestra on its trick ending". Shapiro and Glebbeek described the song's use of flanging on the outro: The rather abrupt editing of the coda takes us into Mitch [Mitchell]'s solo/fill, 'flanged' by Eddie Kramer, an effect achieved by manipulating one of two tape decks running simultaneously and mixing the signal. Jimi [Hendrix] arpeggios and phase-solos his way through the coda, taking the spaceship in stately and regal fashion out of orbit and into the stratosphere.