"Beautiful Day" originated from recording sessions held by U2 in a small room at Hanover Quay Studio in Dublin in the winter of 1999.

"[4] Co-producer Brian Eno was frustrated with the lack of progress on the song, and early one morning, he and Lanois arrived in the studio before U2 to prepare some musical ideas.

[6] During the recording process for the All That You Can't Leave Behind album, the band decided to distance themselves from their 1990s experimentation with electronic dance music in favour of a "return to the traditional U2 sound".

[1] This led to debate amongst the band when the Edge was playing the song on his Gibson Explorer guitar with a tone used in much of their early material up to their 1983 album War.

[2] Several changes were made during this period; Bono added a guitar part that played the song's chord progression to double the bass, an addition that "solidified everything", according to the Edge.

The Edge also changed the bass line in the chorus and converted a keyboard idea of Bono's into a guitar part that added a "sour quality" to balance the track's positivity.

[9] After the opening line, "The heart is a bloom", the rhythm enters, comprising repeated eighth notes on bass guitar and a drum machine.

[9] The verses are relatively quiet until the chorus, when the Edge begins playing the song's guitar riff and Larry Mullen's drums enter.

During the chorus, Bono sings in a restrained manner, contrasting with the Edge's "loud, bellowing" background vocals, a sustained cry of "day".

[9] After the second chorus, a bridge section begins at 1:55, playing the chord progression F♯m–G–D–A, heightening the track's emotion as Bono sings "Touch me / Take me to that other place".

[9] The lyrics for this section are set in space above Earth and describe the sights that one witnesses, including China, the Grand Canyon, tuna fleets, and Bedouin fires.

[10] After the third chorus and a return of the bridge section, the song suddenly ends in a "low-key" fashion; most of the instrumentation stops and a regeneration of a guitar signal drifts back and forth between channels before fading out.

"[11] Blender interpreted the song and the line "it's a beautiful day" as "a vision of abandoning material things and finding grace in the world itself".

[7] In his 2001 book Inside Classic Rock Tracks, Rikki Rooksby described the lyrics as having a "fuzzy" quality and covering an "ambiguous subject area between religion and romance".

He found "grace and salvation" in the verses' lyrics and believed that despite not explicitly explaining how to emotionally persevere, the song has "so many suggestive images that it's enough".

For the final leg of the tour it was moved back to the midpoint of the show and featured a pre-recorded video of astronaut Mark Kelly.

[25][26] U2 performed "Beautiful Day" as the closing song during their 2023–2024 concert residency, U2:UV Achtung Baby Live, at Sphere in the Las Vegas Valley.

After seeing the piece, Bono contacted her and asked if she would adapt it for U2's residency in Nevada;[27] the result was a sequence featuring 26 of the state's endangered species.

[28] The artwork first displayed on screen in sepia tones during the previous song "With or Without You",[29][30] which Bob Gendron said in the Chicago Tribune was "reminiscent of a fresco ceiling in an old cathedral".

[33] Robert Hilburn of the Los Angeles Times called the track proof that the band's music had once again been "graced by the glorious textures of Edge's guitar, and [that] Bono has dropped the masks".

[35] The Philadelphia Inquirer was critical of the song, saying it was not "driven by the fire of true believers", but rather by the band's need for a hit, and that it was "a move to solidify a base that may already have slipped away".

[36] David Browne of Entertainment Weekly was very receptive to "Beautiful Day", noting that the chorus "erupts into a euphoric bellow so uplifting" that it was played during a television broadcast of the 2000 Summer Olympics.

He said the song made him reminiscent of the band's glory days in the late 1980s when so much popular music sought to be "sonically and emotionally uplifting".

[37] Edna Gundersen of USA Today was enthusiastic about the song, calling it "euphoric" and suggesting it was "breathing fresh air into playlists choking on synthetic pop and seething rap-rock".

[10] The publication was more receptive to the song after the release of All That You Can't Leave Behind, saying the album "eas[es] in with the heat-hazy optimism" of the track.

[40] "Beautiful Day" finished in fourth place on the "Best Singles" list from The Village Voice's 2000 Pazz & Jop critics' poll.

In 2008, the song was chosen to play over the end titles of the children's film Nim's Island, starring Abigail Breslin, Jodie Foster and Gerard Butler.

[51] In 2010, a cover of "Beautiful Day" was released by Lee DeWyze as his first single following his victory in the ninth season of American Idol.