Music Notes

Beautiful Day, by U2

My next choice is a classic U2 song, from their 2000 album All That You Can't Leave Behind.

Sound:
Beautiful Day has a pretty typical U2 sound, with multidimensional binaural elements and Bono's distinctive, somewhat thin voice.

I find that after a while many U2 songs, at least the ones I'm aware of, tend to blur into each other; something about their music seems to lack the unique melodic "fingerprint" type of sound on individual songs which I've grown accustomed to having with 1R and ID. I mean, for example, what's the difference between Beautiful Day and Where The Streets Have No Name?

I suppose one would call U2 bland. I find it relaxing, to a point.

Theme:
What makes U2 stand out from the crowd of older school pop-rock artists for me is the lyrics. Not so much that I find them all profound or even perhaps "interesting," but they're consistently decent and of a more philosophical, metaphorical, or thoughtful bent than the average.

Their words are such that I can put on a random song I haven't heard yet and hardly even care what it's saying. In this respect and also as it relates to sonic style, they remind me a lot of Coldplay. These two bands both have reliable, somewhat forgettable lyrics with musical work that can at times feel interchangeable. They make good background music.

Beautiful Day is about finding good in whatever you've been given, kind of like the saying "bloom where you are planted." No matter what stress you're going through, there's always another morning, another sunrise. My favorite lines are "see the bird with a leaf in her mouth/ after the flood all the colors came out" (a reference to Noah's ark) and "I know I'm not a hopeless case."

Significance:
I'd never noticed this song before last year, though I'm sure I must've encountered it. The way I found it is when we were evacuating from Hurricane Milton in October. We drove all day as the rain and wind picked up, and ended up sitting in our car all night at a truck stop just north of the worst of it, because there were no more hotel rooms and it was too intense to drive any further.

Sleep was impossible, of course. I was washing up in the restroom the next morning after it blew over, with annoying music blasting over my head. A song began with more quietness and care than the rest. I recognized U2 and discovered Beautiful Day. A more appropriate song would be hard to find for such a moment, where we were grateful to be alive and well.

Words: 458.

Join "WDC Dragon Vale "