Composition
"Beautiful Day" is played at a tempo of 136 beats per minute in a 4/4 time signature. The song opens with a reverberating electric piano playing over a string synthesiser, introducing the chord progression of A–Bm7–D–G–D9–A. This progression continues throughout the verses and chorus, the changes not always one to a bar. After the opening line, "The heart is a bloom", the rhythm enters, comprising repeated eighth notes on bass guitar and a drum machine. In the first verse, Bono's vocals are in the front in the mix and their production is dry. At 0:29, a guitar arpeggio pattern by The Edge first appears, echoing across channels. The verses are relatively quiet until the chorus, when The Edge begins playing the song's guitar riff and 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".
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". The bridge links to the middle eight with a section in which The Edge repeats a modulated two-note phrase on guitar, beginning at 2:08. After seven seconds, the rhythm breaks and the middle eight begins. The chords in this section follow a progression of Em–D–Em–G–D–Em–G–D–A, implying a key of D major. The bass plays a G note beneath the Em chord, implying a chord change does not occur. 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. 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.
According to Bono, "Beautiful Day" is about "a man who has lost everything, but finds joy in what he still has." 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". 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".
In an episode of the Sundance Channel's Iconoclast, R.E.M. vocalist Michael Stipe said, "I love that song. I wish I'd written it, and they know I wish I'd written it. It makes me dance; it makes me angry that I didn't write it."
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