As U2 were working on the song that would become Beautiful Day, the Edge’s bandmates pulled the guitarist up about the sound he was using. “The problem is it sounds like the Edge in U2,” Bono explained, with an irrefutable reply coming straight back at him. “I am the Edge in U2,” it went. “I can sound like this if I want.”
The exchange, recounted in the frontman’s 2022 memoir Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story, sums up some of the intra-band uncertainty in the group as they worked on tenth album All That You Can’t Leave Behind. It was hardly a moment of crisis – the Dublin quartet were still one of the world’s biggest bands and had embarked on stadium tour of the world, complete with OTT production and a 40-foot lemon, to support their previous album Pop. But there was a sense that things were sliding ever so slightly. Not all of the shows had sold out in North America and the experimental, dance-tinged grooves of Pop was severely lacking in a U2 speciality – songs that connected on a huge scale.
“Some people loved the experimentation,” Edge offered, talking about Pop, “but we were aware of the fact that in the future we needed to deliver on the songwriting side of things.”
A reset was required and, in that sense, the guitar sound Edge was going for – that epic, echoey jangle that had powered some of their biggest 80s hits – was the sign that U2 were heading back to base. Bono & co. were soon on board. Like The Edge, they realised they was no more room for missteps. “We had our mind on the end of the millennium,” Edge recalled to Rolling Stone in 2020. “That, to us, was a very significant moment in time that we felt we had to mark. In some ways, it was a natural moment to reboot and to reassess everything we were trying to do as a band.”
If there’s a song that sums up just how triumphantly U2 achieved that then it’s Beautiful Day. Released as the first single from All That You Can’t…, it turns 25 next week and, as course-corrections go, it doesn’t get much more effective. It has been played at every one of their shows since and helped set them up for another wave of renewed success – put it this way, U2 have had no problems selling out shows since.
Like a handful of other U2 classics (The Fly and Vertigo, to name two), it was born out of a different song. This one was called Always, a track released as part of the bonus material on the 20th anniversary of All That You Can’t… in 2020. You can hear the roots of Beautiful Day in its warm chord changes and the explosive uplift of its chorus riff but the melodious, euphoric hook of the finished song isn’t there yet. It actually sounds a bit flat.
But the band kept plugging away, working on it over and over in their Dublin studio alongside returning collaborators Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois (bringing the team back together with whom they’d made The Joshua Tree and Achtung Baby was another sign that they had no problem leaning into what worked for them in the past to move forward). It was during one such 20-minute jam of Always that Bono ad-libbed the line, “It’s a beautiful day/Don’t let it get away” and they realised that was the anchor they needed.
Combining a punchy, anthemic chorus with a pulsing rhythm that Eno had worked up for the verse, Beautiful Day came together. “We wanted to showcase the chemistry of a band,” Edge said of their ambition to fashion a more spirited and rock’n’roll sound than their past couple of records. They pulled it off and then some. Beautiful Day has become such a pop-rock FM staple that it’s hard to remember just how fresh it sounded when they unveiled it back in 2000. This was U2 revitalised. Mission complete.
“We were looking for some ecstatic quality,” Bono said of the song in his book. “To sing a chorus like ‘It's a beautiful day,’ we'd need some clouds parting, the sun coming out, some kind of road rising.”
The song became one of U2’s biggest hits, going to Number One in the UK and winning three Grammys in 2001. Not long after its release, U2 played an intimate show at the Astoria in London and Bono announced that they were “reapplying for the job”. “Do you know what the job is?” he asked the crowd. “Best band in the world.” With Beautiful Day on their CV, they were back amongst the contenders.
