Best Day of My Life

"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 extended play, American Authors (2013), and the second single from their debut studio album, Oh, What a Life (2014). 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. Composition The song is written in D major with a tempo of 96 beats per minute. Music and lyrics 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."