Songfacts®:

• This uplifting power ballad marked Celine Dion's return to music after she took a two-year hiatus to deal with some tumultuous personal issues. Her husband had just been diagnosed with esophageal cancer and, after years of struggling with infertility, Dion underwent surgery and in vitro fertilization to aid conception. She welcomed her first child, René-Charles Angélil, on January 25, 2001. The experience of finally having her "miracle baby" inspired her comeback song.
• Dion said the title was also meant to instill hope in the wounded nation after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. "It represents my child, because I gave life," she told Billboard. "Obviously, it also marks my return with a new album. But a new day has also come in the lives of other people because something bad has happened, because we've lost lives, because there's a scar on our world now."
• This was written by Canadian songwriters Aldo Nova and Stephan Moccio. Nova, who had a big hit with his own self-titled debut album in 1982, befriended Dion when he was a writer and producer on her 1987 Incognito album. He first met Moccio, a classical pianist who went on to write Miley Cyrus' "Wrecking Ball," in 2001 when the Vice President of A&R for Sony Music Canada suggested the pair work together. They hit it off immediately. "A New Day Has Come" was born during their third writing session after Moccio suggested a piano melody he'd been saving for a while.
  
  "'A New Day' stood out as the song we should focus on," Moccio told Songwriter Universe. "Aldo knew Celine very well, and he was able to write about [the hardship she endured] trying to have a baby, and the great joy she experienced with the birth of her son. I wrote most of the music, and Aldo wrote most of the lyrics. We finished writing the song in one afternoon."
• This was originally written in 6/8 time but, after it was chosen as the lead single, it was converted to 4/4 for the radio version. "But you're not going to complain," Moccio told the Songfacts Podcast in 2021. "Back then, you're still selling records and everyone's like, why are you complaining? Well, the beauty of that is we ended up having two versions of that song on the album and it ended up becoming the title of her album."
  
  Moccio is also fortunate that he only has to share the royalties with one other writer instead of a committee of pop scribes. "It was 50/50, and it's really tough to be 50/50 on a pop record these days," he explained. "There's 10,000 writers these days - there's literally 14 or 16 writers at times - and everyone's dividing and there are little splits in it. But it was an anomaly, it was like I had two songs on a Celine Dion album when she was still selling north of 20 million albums a pop."
• Moccio also produced the demo, which has him playing piano and singing background vocals. Walter Afanasieff, who won the Grammy for Producer of the Year, Non-Classical for Dion's Titanic number "My Heart Will Go On," was tapped to produce the final version. Said Moccio: "He ended up keeping most of my piano and keyboards, and we just put a 65-piece String Orchestra on it with Celine's voice, and he added a few other things, and the rest is history."
• Although A New Day Has Come was Dion's fourth #1 album in the US, it was her first to debut at the top of the chart. It also went to #1 in the UK, Canada, Australia, and France, among other countries.
• The music video, directed by Dave Meyers, finds Dion singing among the clouds as people down below struggle to find hope in their day-to-day lives. Although it features shots of different cityscapes, the clip was filmed in West Palm Beach, Florida. Meyers also directed the clip for the album's second single, "I'm Alive."