"Purple Haze" is often interpreted as a psychedelic experience, though Jimi Hendrix himself described it as a love song. He also spoke of writing it after a dream where he was walking under the sea, with an early draft featuring dream-like imagery and a distorted sense of direction and time. The song features Hendrix's inventive guitar playing, which uses a signature chord now known as the "Hendrix chord," and blends blues and Eastern musical styles. At its heart, it plays like a journey into a vivid, disorienting dreamscape.