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Are You Experienced

Rock / Psychedelia & studio experiments · 1967

Are You Experienced

The Jimi Hendrix Experience

Why listen

A trio keeps changing the boundary between a sung phrase, a guitar response and a rhythmic interruption.

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Tracks · previews

English editorial edition

Album story

The guitar announces Purple Haze with a collision, but Hendrix’s voice soon makes the space feel surprisingly close. When he stops singing, the instrument can take over the sentence while the drums move around it. This is a useful entrance into Are You Experienced: follow the exchange of roles rather than count the extraordinary sounds.

The 1967 debut belongs to the Experience, with Noel Redding on bass and Mitch Mitchell on drums alongside Hendrix’s guitar and vocals. Chas Chandler produced the London recordings. There is also more than one original album programme: Britain received its edition in May and the United States a differently selected and sequenced edition in August. This account follows the eleven-song American programme beginning with Purple Haze, while keeping that distinction visible.

Listen past the foreground

Redding and Mitchell need not disappear behind the guitar. The bass can provide a place to return to while the drums divide the surrounding space into restless gestures. In Manic Depression, compare the collective drive with the moments that leave room for a vocal phrase. The players do not have to make identical shapes to maintain a shared direction. Even when the timbre feels unfamiliar, their relationship supplies something physical to follow.

A song can change its surface

May This Be Love and The Wind Cries Mary make gentleness part of the album’s range, not merely a break from noise. Fire compresses its energy; Third Stone from the Sun opens a different kind of space. Instead of claiming that Hendrix invented distortion, listen to how a change of sound changes your attention within a song. The record offers several ways of being absorbed, not one continuous demonstration of force.

Let an edition have an ending

The British original omits Purple Haze, Hey Joe and The Wind Cries Mary; the American original omits Red House, Remember and Can You See Me. On the selected expanded edition, six additional songs follow the American eleven. Stop at the title track once before continuing. Hearing more material and hearing how a programme closes are complementary pleasures, but they are not the same experience.

The album through its tracks

Follow the first eleven tracks of the American programme and notice which instrument claims your attention when a vocal phrase ends.

  1. Purple Haze

    After the opening collision, notice how clearly the short song is organised. A vocal statement gives the guitar an opportunity to answer; rough texture does not erase that structure. The official session retrospective describes repeated recording and overdubbing work, so this need not be imagined as three musicians captured in a single uninterrupted take. It opens the American album but was absent from the British original, an important distinction for such a familiar entrance. Follow the recurring guitar figure first, then listen to what the drums do before it returns. The attraction is not simply a display of strange noises: a recognisable framework keeps acquiring different edges as the performance moves.

    Reference · Experience Hendrix: 55th-anniversary session account and release schedule

  2. The Wind Cries Mary

    Listen to the little guitar phrases between the sung lines. They make accompaniment and lead playing feel like connected activities: a chord settles, a small movement slips out of it, and the next vocal phrase draws the guitar back. Seventh on the American original, the song had appeared as a British single rather than on the British LP. That context helps keep its place in this sequence distinct. On a second pass, follow the bass beneath those guitar responses. Nothing needs to erupt for the direction of a few notes to become an event. The song broadens the portrait of Hendrix without asking us to divide his music neatly into noise and beauty.

    Reference · Apple Music US: deluxe edition with US programme followed by additional material

Listen next

Electric Ladyland gives songs and studio spaces more room to unfold. Carry the instrumental conversations heard here into that later double album.

Electric Ladyland ↗
References & editorial note

Written for English readers. Album facts are referenced below; listening suggestions are editorial interpretations. AI-assisted editorial review; not independently human-reviewed.