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"Best Day of My Life" is a song by American pop rock band American Authors, released on March 19, 2013 by Mercury Records and Island Records as the lead single from their third EP, American Authors, and the second single from their debut studio album, Oh, What a Life. The song was written by band members Zac Barnett, Dave Rublin, Matt Sanchez, and James Adam Shelley, along with producers Aaron Accetta and Shep Goodman.
Dave Rublin spoke in a podcast of Songfacts where he disclosed that the song was being written when the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting happened in 2012. They were inspired to write the song to "make people happy and make people feel positive, because that's something that was missing from rock and from songwriting, just something so simplistic that can be an earworm, that can carry people."
Zac Barnett told an interviewer for Blueprint Magazine, "Recently we have been experimenting with a lot of different instruments including banjo, mandolin and various percussion toys. Africa-influenced rhythms have been taking more of a prominent role in our songs which has then opened up our ideas on melodies. We're always open to trying new things and we get very excited to learn new instruments and experiment with new sounds. … "Best Day of My Life" was an idea that James and I had been messing around with. We had the pre-chorus and chorus but once we showed the idea to the rest of the guys they came in and restructured the verses and added the stuttered "life" chorus. Looking back on it, the song changed a lot from the initial idea but that's what I love so much about it. I'll always remember that song being started on acoustic guitars in my tiny Bushwick bedroom, but all of us together as a band really took the song to a completely different place."
Barnett mentions "the stuttered 'life' chorus"—as in "the best day of my li-i-i-i-ife"; the "stuttering" also occurs in a recurrent "whoa-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh"—by which he refers to a lyrical tradition of stuttering in rock music, popularized by Buddy Holly, David Bowie ("Ch-Ch-Changes"), Elton John, and others.
Bill Lamb, writing for About.com, praised the song's "opening banjo lick" as "a perfect first hook," its "irrepressibly upbeat lyrics," and "a blend of key elements from across a wide range of current successful pop music." He added, "The bass drum heavy backing percussion sounds a little like Imagine Dragons, and backed by a pop-punk style "Whoa Oh" chorus, "Best Day of My Life" takes some of the most distinctive elements of a variety of current pop hit genres and blends them into something new." The song also utilizes the millennial whoop.
The song received significant airplay on the radio for it to debut at No. 49 in the Hot Rock Songs and No. 40 in the Adult Top 40 for charts dated October 5, 2013. It began climbing the various rock charts and became a crossover hit on both alternative rock and top 40 stations, becoming big hits on those formats and peaking at No. 2, No. 18 and No. 4 on the Hot Rock Songs, Alternative Songs, and Mainstream Top 40 charts, and was a sleeper hit.
It debuted on the Billboard Hot 100 at No. 93 for the chart dated November 30, 2013, and eventually peaked at No. 11 on the charts dated April 19 and May 10, 2014. By March, 2014, it had reached No. 1 on the Adult Top 40. The song reached its first million sales mark in the United States in March 2014, and its second million in August 2014. The song was certified 2× Platinum on July 16, 2014 by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). The song was ranked number one on Billboard's chart of Adult Pop Songs for 2014. To date, it remains the only single by the band to break the top 40 in the United States.
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