![]() ![]() Listen to the best of U2 on Apple Music and Spotify.īut the song’s true legacy is in the moments that it has soundtracked over the last 20 years. And at the 43rd Annual Grammy Awards, “Beautiful Day” took home the trophies for Song of the Year, Record of the Year, and Best Rock Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocal. Critics who had cooled on the band’s late-90s work hailed the song as a return to form: Rolling Stone was particularly praiseworthy, later calling it the ninth-best song of the 2000s and adding it to the magazine’s “500 Greatest Songs of All Time” list.Īfter its release as a single in October 2000, the song topped music sales charts in nearly a dozen countries and sold more than a million copies around the world. adding color and punch to the track.Ĭritically and commercially, “Beautiful Day” was the hit that U2 needed. And even with the drum machine, U2’s rhythm section is as airtight as ever, with bassist Adam Clayton and drummer Larry Mullen Jr. Likewise, the Edge’s return to a familiar guitar tone – after several years of trying to not sound like himself – feels like a warm hug from an old friend, and underscores just how simply effective his playing is. To this day he remains one of rock’s greatest singers, one who can imbue a line like “Teach me, I know I’m not a hopeless case” with the emotive force of a wrecking ball. #Lyrics beautiful day u2 fullAfter adopting a rougher and more understated vocal style on Zooropa and Pop, Bono returned to using the full range of his voice, a dazzling and inimitable instrument. There are a few embellishments that give the song a more modern sound – Eno added some synthesized strings at the beginning, as well as a drum machine that thumps and clicks throughout the track – but “Beautiful Day” derives almost all of its power from letting U2 do what they do best. ![]() But moments later, the chorus hits like a sunbeam breaking through rainclouds as Bono reminds you, “It’s a beautiful day / Don’t let it get away.” “You’re out of luck and the reason that you had to care/The traffic is stuck and you’re not moving anywhere,” Bono croons at the beginning of the song, in a voice that’s closer to speaking than singing. The band continued to tinker with “Always” until one day, while jamming in the studio, Bono spontaneously sang “It’s a beautiful day” – and just like that, they not only had a new approach to an old song, but the genesis of an entirely new one.īono wrote an entirely new set of lyrics that suggested loss but also optimism. Listen to “Always” and you’ll see how closely its chorus resembles that of the later hit. “Beautiful Day” grew out of “Always,” a song that U2 wrote in the earliest recording sessions for All That You Can’t Leave Behind but weren’t entirely satisfied with. But after Pop’s underwhelming critical and commercial performance, the band realized that they had, in the words of guitarist the Edge, “taken the deconstruction of the rock’n’roll band format” as far as they could. U2 continued this artistic trajectory through their next two albums, 1993’s Zooropa and 1997’s Pop, experimenting with electronic music and writing more disillusioned lyrics. ![]() For their 1991 masterpiece, Achtung Baby, the band jettisoned their well-worn sincerity and fascination with American roots music in favor of recording something darker and more abrasive. Like Nirvana, who was also a contender for the “best band in the world” title in the 90s, U2 spent much of the decade deliberately picking their fame apart. When “Beautiful Day,” the lead single from the band’s tenth album, All That You Can’t Leave Behind, won three Grammy Awards just two weeks later, it must have felt like confirmation that they got their old job back. “We’re back, re-applying for the job of best band in the world,” U2frontman Bono announced onstage at London’s Astoria Theatre on the night of February 7, 2001. ![]()
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