It’s a Wonderful Day! -An Original

Hello everybody and welcome once again to my blog where I share the backstories of how I wrote my original songs, how I put together my YouTube videos, and some fun music memories from college. Today’s blog is about the backstory of how I wrote my song, “It’s a Wonderful Day!” Feel free to check out the video of the song, as well as consider buying the sheet music for it.

As I’ve mentioned before in my blog about my song, “Peanut Butter and Jam”, I used to work at my neighbor’s Daycare off and on. One day while working in January of 2021, I woke up feeling grumpy. I don’t remember the day perfectly, but as I recall I woke up with these negative feelings due to the lack of enough sleep.

Nevertheless, I went to work and tried to clear my head of any negativity while I looked after a group of energized and mischievous children. When lunch was over, it was time for the younger kids to take naps and the older kids to sit quietly and watch something on T.V. It was also the best time to clean things. I was often asked to clean toys in the playroom. I would dunk most of the toys in the bathtub that was filled with water and chlorine and then shake the water off the toys, leaving them on a blanket stretched out on the floor for them to dry off. But when it came to other toys, such as those with batteries in them or those that were too big to fit in the tub, they were just sprayed.

On this day that I had woken up feeling moody, I was trying to spray a toy but I missed and hit a part of my hand that wasn’t completely covered by my cleaning glove. I have eczema in the winter and even though my hands were mostly protected, spraying myself with chlorine frustrated me! I was so close to vocally expressing this frustration, but I remembered the sleeping children in the next room and quickly forced a smile on my face. Suddenly, I found myself quietly singing, “It’s a wonderful day for nothing to go my way!” Hey! I thought to myself. That could be a new song I could write!

So once again, I found myself making up a song as I worked a shift at this daycare. I thought about the mood I was in that morning when I woke up. “It happened to start with a tear in my heart”... but that sounds like a clique phrase that any person would say… I continued thinking to myself as I sprayed more toys. Then I realized that the word “clique” rhymed with the words “day” and “way”. I could do two rhymes in one line, another two rhymes in the next line, and a final line that ended with a word that rhymed with the first two rhymes.

It’s a wonderful day for nothing to go my way.

It happened to start with a tear in my heart.

I know, it sounds so clique.

Perfect. I was off to a good start with this song. I continued to brainstorm as I worked, but unlike the song “Peanut Butter and Jam” it didn’t get finished within 20 minutes. I ended up working on it during the spring semester, which was really needed because of the stress I had for each of my classes. It didn’t take too much time to complete the first verse, but I got stumped after writing the first line of the chorus. “This day couldn’t be better, and I know it’s gonna get worse.” What rhymes with “worse”? All I could think of was “hearse”, but I didn’t want this song to be about death or hearses. I couldn’t imagine how that would even work for the song. But I didn’t want to rewrite such an awesome line, so I kept trying!

One day while walking across campus to a class, I tried once again to think of a different rhyme. Hearse…no, not hearse. Something else! Not hearse…wait…rehearse! I remembered that there are so many times that I get stressed out that the worst things could happen. I’m basically using up my energy for something that might not even happen! There’s no fear I need to rehearse, I thought to myself. I’m not perfect at avoiding this “pre-stress”, but I try to do better now at not getting worked up over what could happen.

So I finally found a rhyme for “worse”. Now what? I was busy with school and didn’t have all the time in the world to add on to the chorus, but I had a vague idea of a tune that would follow the two lines previously written. One day when carpooling back home from college with a friend, I mentioned the song and he wanted to hear what I had written so far. So I sang the first verse, the two lines of the chorus, and hummed the tune I had so far after that. After I stopped singing, he told me that it reminded him of the pick-me-up songs his mom would listen to when she was feeling down. It was only a little while later that I realized that I could use that as part of my song. After all, it was exactly what I was trying to do: “Put my complaints into a pick-me-up song” and try to look on the bright side of things. This bit of inspiration helped me finish the chorus!

Later on in the semester and while I was surrounded by stressful things, I found myself in my advisor’s office talking things out with him. His go-to advice about stress is usually the same. He tells me to take time to accept what I’m feeling. He’s a firm believer that it’s not about hiding the feelings you have, it’s about accepting them, taking the time to process them, and then moving on. Bottling them up and pretending that they don’t exist will make things worse! I’ve tried to express this way of thinking in the second verse of this song. “I’m accepting the things I’m feeling, and then I’ll keep moving on”. It is then when “I can change up my mood”. It’s okay for us to feel down and express our emotions before we focus on the bright side of things again.

Finally, the third verse and chorus is about the hindsight of the day as a whole when it ends. A lot of hard things happen to us each day. But most often when we look back on our day as it comes to a close, we might come to find that it wasn’t as bad as we thought. I wanted to emphasize this by changing up words in the chorus. “It could have gone worse”, “no fear I had to rehearse”, “it was such a great day”, “what a wonderful day!”

I hope you enjoyed reading the backstory of this song! Please feel free to check out all of my videos, buy the sheet music for any or all of my original songs on my website, donate to the website, and/or click the other links in this blog previously mentioned. Have you ever had a bad day that when looking back you realized that it wasn’t that bad? Please feel free to comment down below!

Thanks for reading all the way to the end!