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Ryan Beatty was about to embark on the final leg of his “Calico” tour in 2024 when he cut the song “Phantom” with frequent collaborator Ethan Gruska. He was in Los Angeles, the city he calls home, when they worked on the tune,
a lilting, slow-burning track that gradually blooms like a flower. At the time, he knew there was something there; perhaps it could be a bridge away from his critically acclaimed third album “Calico,” a gorgeous record that grappled with the end of a relationship by examining its finer details, as if to grasp at them one last time before they slipped away.
“‘Phantom’ felt like it was this last breath of ‘Calico’ and this new life into whatever was next,” Beatty tells Variety of the first song on his fourth record “Sweet Fortune,” out this Friday. “It feels like a farewell and a hello at the same time. I love that.”
Indeed, “Sweet Fortune” isn’t decidedly different for Beatty, but rather an elevation, or perhaps evolution, of the Americana sound that he probed on its predecessor. Across the album’s 10 tracks, Beatty sings of the joys and challenges of a long-distance relationship, opening himself up to the listener in a way that feels plainly confessional, as though he’s drawing a direct line to his lived experience.
“Sweet Fortune” is, says Beatty, a record borne out of happiness and the vulnerability that comes with 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, 30, is seated at a picnic bench in Los Angeles’ Griffith Park as he discusses the record, the hood of his sweatshirt 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” with Gruska, who worked on “Calico” and has previously collaborated with Phoebe Bridgers and Olivia Rodrigo. The record is tender yet assured, tracing the feelings of falling in love and learning how to navigate them. On lead single “Secret Language,” Beatty gives way to surrender: “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.”
He also paints with broader musical strokes than on “Calico,” incorporating wind and brass instruments and traipsing from ballads to dust-ups. The album recalls the fleshy yet sensitive songs that he wrote for Beyoncé’s “Cowboy Carter,” which earned him a Grammy for album of the year, the type of intimate odes that make his music so specifically 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 decamped to New York City, looking for a change of pace to jolt him out of the familiarity of Los Angeles. He worked with various songwriters, including Amy Allen and Leon Michaels, and called his friend Clairo to collaborate on some ideas. She ended up co-writing the title track and “Delancey,” as well as contributing 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 does, understandably, shy away from discussing the relationship that inspired the album beyond the music itself. He’s private in a way that his online presence suggests — he isn’t on X, and posts sparingly on Instagram. (On his burner account, he’s a bit more liberal.) He explains that he’d prefer to take a write-what-you-know approach, pouring his emotions into the songwriting and letting it 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” is Beatty at his most realized, leaps beyond his 2018 full-length debut, “Boy in Jeans,” and its follow-up, 2020’s “Dreaming of David,” both of which positioned him as a bubbling pop star who was 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 ago had been slinging hooks for rap collective Brockhampton. He’s very aware of how he’s matured as an artist over the years, particularly in his approach to singing.
“Your voice will take on like 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, then Beatty plans to manifest it on the road this fall as part of his upcoming “Arms Over Armor” tour, which takes him across North America and Europe. He seems invigorated by the precedent that “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.”
