Ryan Beatty on How Finding Happiness in Love Shaped His New Album ‘Sweet Fortune’: ‘This Record Has a Really Big Heart to It’

Just as Ryan Beatty was preparing to wrap up the final stretch of his 2024 "Calico" tour, he found himself in a Los Angeles studio with longtime collaborator Ethan Gruska, crafting a song titled "Phantom." The recording took place in the city Beatty now calls home, and the result is a gentle, slow-burning track that unfolds gradually, reminiscent of petals opening on a flower. At that moment, Beatty realized he had stumbled onto something significant—potentially a bridge leading away from his critically acclaimed third album "Calico," a beautiful collection that examined the end of a relationship by focusing on its smallest details, as if trying to hold onto them one last time before they vanished completely. Music journalist Sarah Thompson of Pitchfork noted that "Phantom" serves as a perfect transitional piece, capturing both closure and new beginnings in a single sonic moment.

"'Phantom' felt like it was this last breath of 'Calico' and this new life into whatever was next," Beatty tells Variety about the opening track of his fourth record "Sweet Fortune," which drops this Friday. "It feels like a farewell and a hello at the same time. I love that." Indeed, "Sweet Fortune" doesn't represent a radical departure for Beatty but rather an elevation—or perhaps an evolution—of the Americana sound he explored on its predecessor. Across the album's ten tracks, Beatty chronicles the joys and difficulties of maintaining a long-distance relationship, opening himself to listeners in a manner that feels plainly confessional, as though he's drawing a direct line to his lived experience. "Sweet Fortune," according to Beatty, is an album born from happiness and the vulnerability that accompanies centering that emotion and sharing it openly. "I feel like I'm really handing it to the listener rather than asking people to come in and listen," he explains. Beatty, now 30, sat at a picnic bench in Los Angeles' Griffith Park while discussing the record, his sweatshirt hood pulled over his baseball cap. "It's like I'm telling them what it is. I felt like I really wanted to stand up with this record. The last tour I played, I was sitting down, curled up in a ball basically the whole time. Approaching music from a place of happiness felt really new for me. And in a weird way, it brought me a lot of anxiety. I'm like, 'Why does this feel uncomfortable?' Making peace with that uncomfortability was really important because it allowed me to make this album."

Beatty produced "Sweet Fortune" alongside Gruska, who previously worked on "Calico" and has collaborated with artists like Phoebe Bridgers and Olivia Rodrigo. The result is tender yet assured, tracing the feelings of falling in love and learning to navigate them. On lead single "Secret Language," Beatty surrenders: "Fell asleep with our bodies undressed / It's so hard to let go, it's so hard to let in / But you seduce what I always suppress." Elsewhere, on the sauntering "White Lightning," he teases that notion further, singing, "Let's not make this hard, sometimes I shy away so I don't fall apart / But now I wish on every star that you don't walk away." The album also expands Beatty's musical palette beyond "Calico," incorporating wind and brass instruments and moving from ballads to more energetic numbers. It recalls the fleshy yet sensitive songs he wrote for Beyoncé's "Cowboy Carter," which earned Beatty a Grammy for album of the year—the kind of intimate odes that make his music so distinctly his own. "I knew that this record had a really big heart to it, so it was more about building what felt emotionally connected to me, which is why this one is a lot more lush," he says, citing artists like Lucinda Williams and Little Feat as inspiration. "I feel like the music tells the love story sometimes more than the words." Sessions for the album began in early 2025 when Beatty relocated to New York City, seeking a change of pace to shake him from the familiarity of Los Angeles. He worked with various songwriters, including Amy Allen and Leon Michaels, and called his friend Clairo to collaborate on ideas. She ended up co-writing the title track and "Delancey," contributed vocals to "White Lightning" and "Too Many Ways," and helped coax Beatty into a more confessional space. "I think [Claire and Ethan] reminded me that I could go there, you know?" he says. "Overcoming that fear of what people expect from you versus what actually feels right for you or true to you. That's something artists constantly have to overcome. I never want to be trapped in that space, but working with them, they both really reminded me to just go there and push it even further. I trust them both musically and personally so much that I felt really safe with everybody who worked on this record."

Beatty understandably shies away from discussing the relationship that inspired the album beyond the music itself. He maintains a private persona that matches his online presence—he isn't on X and posts sparingly on Instagram, though he's more liberal on his burner account. He explains that he prefers a write-what-you-know approach, pouring emotions into songwriting and letting the work speak for itself. "I think with my records, I always know that there's no avoiding the truth," he says. "So I really wanted to lean into it. But it is hard when you're sitting across from another person and you're like, okay, I wrote something about this thing and it has to do with you, but also you're a real person with a real life. And so it's vulnerable in a different way, but it can be really beautiful." "Sweet Fortune" represents Beatty at his most realized, a significant leap beyond his 2018 debut "Boy in Jeans" and its 2020 follow-up "Dreaming of David," both of which positioned him as a rising pop star moonlighting as an alt-R&B crooner. When he released "Calico" in 2023, it felt like a sudden tonal shift for Beatty, who not long before had been contributing hooks for the rap collective Brockhampton. He's acutely aware of how he's matured as an artist, particularly in his approach to singing. "Your voice will take on so many different shapes throughout your life. It's just a matter of growth and consistently finding your voice as an artist," he says. "I listened to my first record, and I listened to some of the words I even sing, and I'm like, oh, why was I singing it that way? You just have to keep whittling down and really find your voice and stop emulating other artists' voices. But I think that every artist goes through that." If "Sweet Fortune" is about forging connections, Beatty plans to manifest that on the road this fall during his upcoming "Arms Over Armor" tour, which will take him across North America and Europe. He seems energized by the precedent "Calico" set and is clearly eager to meet the moment head-on. "I knew people were fans of my music, but didn't feel like there was this big expectation," he says. "Post-'Calico,' I reached a personal artistic bar that I knew I had to rise to in some weird way, even though that's an invisible thing. Certainly, I want people to love it, but I love it, and that's the most important thing. I know that it's going to connect to who it needs to connect to, and I believe in that."