Songfacts®:

• "With its Curtis Mayfield vibe and the strings, the message of 'Beautiful Day' is I don't care what's going on," Brian Owens explained on his website. "Every day I wake up is a good day. It's an opportunity for new grace and new mercy, new expressions of love … and new failure, which has to precede new success!"
• At the last minute, Owens added an intro and outro that features four of his young children laughing and playing on a toy piano. "We'd already recorded the song and I wanted an intro because I just didn't like the way that it had started before. I wanted an intro but I didn't know what type of intro to use," Owens recalled in a Songfacts interview. "One day, we went to a park in our town, Ferguson, and it's a really nice park because it's basically a school playground so you can go there after school's out. I have six kids but I had four of them that day, ranging in ages from eight to I think my son at the time, the youngest, was almost two. They were just playing, and the cool thing is the jungle gym there has a piano in it, like a tinker-tinker piano.
  
  I took my iPhone out and started recording them running around and I said, 'Oh, play that, play that.' And then I was like, 'Hey, guys, sing 'Beautiful Day,' and they sang it. Then I came back and edited it down and I thought, 'That's really cool.'"