100 Best Songs of the 2000s: U2, 'Beautiful Day'

100 Best Songs of the 2000s

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U2, 'Beautiful Day'

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The song that re-established U2 as the world's biggest band looked backward, reviving the skyscraping sound of their Eighties classics. But the lyrics — "See the canyons broken by cloud/See the tuna fleets clearing the sea out" — were more ambivalent than the title suggested, a prayer for transcendence in a wounded world.

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