Beautiful Day
by U2
- 136
- BPM
- D major
- Key
- 10B
- Camelot
- 54
- Danceability
- 2
- Acousticness
The first version of "Beautiful Day" was a different song called "Always", worked out in a small room at Hanover Quay Studio in Dublin in the winter of 1999. It began with a chord sequence from Bono that the Edge adapted, and after several days it was going nowhere. The Edge called it "pretty ho-hum" as a straight rock song.
Brian Eno, frustrated, got in early with Daniel Lanois to prepare ideas. Eno built a drum machine rhythm with piano and synthesized strings, and Lanois played a Fender Telecaster part a third above the root of the Edge's sequence. When the band arrived, the changes lifted them. Near the end of a 20-minute jam Bono sang, "It's a beautiful day, don't let it get away", and after lunch the producers edited that line into the earlier sections as the chorus. The Edge improvised a high backing vocal and Lanois added a lower doo-wop part.
The band argued over the Edge's guitar tone on his Gibson Explorer, which echoed their early 1980s sound. Bono resisted, but the Edge won. Mixing took two weeks, with Steve Lillywhite brought in to finish. The song came out as a lead single on October 9, 2000, and at the 2001 Grammy Awards it won Song of the Year, Record of the Year and Best Rock Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocal.
Beautiful Day runs at 136 BPM, the tempo of techno, trance and big-room dance. In classical terms it sits in allegro territory. A bar of 4/4 lasts 1.76 seconds, and a quarter-note delay is 441 ms. It is in D major, Camelot 10B, which shares its notes with B minor and mixes cleanly with G major and A major.
We use multiple sources as part of our online research for the song story including Wikipedia.