Songfacts®:

• This joyful, banjo-laced tune celebrates the best in life, but was conceived in reaction to tragedy: the Sandy Hook school shooting on December 14, 2012. On the Songfacts Podcast, American Authors bass player Dave Rublin explained: "We were upstate in the woods writing with our producer when the Sandy Hook shooting happened. When we heard the news, it was shocking to all of us because it happened right down the street from where we were. And in that framework, we were thinking that the world has hit a whole new low, and we wanted to focus on making things that 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."
• American Authors first got together in 2006 while attending Berklee College of Music. They comprise vocalist Zachary Barnett, guitarist James Adam Shelley, bassist Dave Rublin and drummer Matt Sanchez. The quartet spent their first years in Boston recording and performing music under the name The Blue Pages before relocating to New York in 2010. They released two albums, Anthropology and Rich With Love, but decided the name wasn't working for them, so they came up with American Authors and started working with producer Shep Goodman, which reinvigorated the band. When they recorded their song "Believer," Goodman took it to various radio stations and it got enough heat to earn the band a deal with Mercury Records, which released "Best Day Of My Life" as the first single on the label.
• The song was originally marketed to Alternative radio stations, but interest soared at other formats after it was used in TV commercial for Lowe's hardware stores. It has also featured in commercials for Lay's and Toyota, in a UK Hyundai advert, and a Telecom New Zealand campaign, as well as being placed in the trailer for the Vince Vaughn movie, Delivery Man.
• Barnett told Billboard magazine the story of the song. "It was a really fun song to write," he said. "It's actually pieces from five different songs that we just combined. At first we didn't know if it worked or not, so we sat on it for a while, but when we came back to it we realized, 'This is really cool. We think we have something special here.'"
• Barnett explained the song's meaning to American Songwriter magazine: "We wanted to tell this story of how no matter what's going on - whether you're stuck at your job or having a bad day - there's always an escape from that, and there's always a way to make any day the best day of your life. It's about escaping reality and entering into that dream world."
• The song featured in the 2013 Ben Stiller movie The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.