Ryan Beatty - Sweet Fortune Sweet Fortune, Ryan Beatty’s fourth album, arrives after nearly a decade in which he reinvented himself time and time again, traversing the spectrum of the pop world. He delivered hooks for artists like Brockhampton and Tyler, The Creator in the late ‘10s, then would venture into the ether to dream up his own albums — quieter, blearier, more reflective. In more recent years, he toured with Noah Kahan and Maggie Rogers while secretly working on what would become Beyonce’s blockbuster 2024 album Cowboy Carter. Beatty would go on to win the Album Of The Year Grammy for contributing four songs to the record. Yet even his most stratospheric mainstream successes didn’t change how he needed to work when it was time for his own music. “My career has been long and slow-building, which has ultimately helped my art and how I approach music,” Beatty says. “With every record, I have to feel pulled to and by it. I can’t think about what I’ve done in the past or what people expect from me.” Initially, Beatty was anxious to begin writing again. He knew he had to find new songs that excited him as much as 2023’s Calico, and decided to change things up. In late 2024, Sweet Fortune’s first songs began to take shape, and Beatty decamped for a writing retreat in New York City. While there, he reconvened with producer Ethan Gruska, and also linked up with Claire Cottrill, the musician otherwise known as Clairo. Beatty wanted a shock to the system and found it, walking to the studio in the snow and weaving his way to a handful of songs that conjured a smoky, nocturnal aesthetic far more New York than the California he knew so well. From there Sweet Fortune cohered, stretching out across the continent and time alike, just as its sound and themes did. The skeleton key was “Phantom,” destined to become Sweet Fortune’s evocative, cinematic opener. It felt different than anything Beatty had done before, and in turn gave him new sounds, new chords, and new melodies to chase. Each of Beatty’s albums to date are aesthetically and spiritually distinct from one another, yet there had nevertheless been a sharp pivot to the restrained singer-songwriter approach of Calico. Sweet Fortune partially picks up where Calico left off, but finds Beatty pushing even further into a sound unlike much of anything in today’s pop landscape. While Calico still features contemporary pop melodic sensibilities over classicist songwriting, Sweet Fortune became something else. You can imagine it existing in any of the last seven decades and yet in none of them. It’s an album that finds Beatty completely on his own musical wavelength, solidifying his stature as an auteurist pop visionary. Sweet Fortune’s songs began spare, just voice and guitar or piano, and then he and Gruska expanded them with horn and string arrangements. Sweet Fortune is often hushed and patient, with these moments of orchestration carefully meted out. When they bloom, it sounds like Technicolor flooding the screen, echoing both the panoramic American sounds Beatty sought but also the euphoric, life-altering feelings he was communicating in these songs. It was the slow closing of a wound, a final break from the past. That’s where Ryan Beatty had arrived with Calico, the end destination in a trilogy of early albums that detailed his journey of self-realization. In the years since, Beatty fell in love and entered into a long-distance relationship. He was more confident as a songwriter than ever, but now faced his greatest artistic challenge: capturing real life happiness without metaphor, a real person sitting in front of him in all their complexity. “You can create so much fantasy when writing about heartbreak, stories of what once was or what could’ve been,” Beatty says. “With Sweet Fortune I felt like I had less to prove to anybody and could talk about this real person, and this real thing I’m going through. I’m telling it like it is, approaching it with open arms.” It’s all there in “Secret Language,” Sweet Fortune’s lead single. Beginning as an easygoing, twangy lope, the song is a place where Beatty allows him to go as big as the whirlwind of new love: The song swells, his voice pouring open over warm, sun-dappled horns, capturing the early, overwhelmed-yet-tentative moments of new love when you are afraid to say what you really mean. But it also conveys how relationships deepen and grow, when a couple’s lives intertwine and it feels as if they have their own way of communicating that nobody else in the world understands. From there, Beatty never shies away from depicting relationships in all their highs and lows. “Delancey” is the sound of a sideways, still-sorta-drunk walk home on empty New York streets as the sun threatens the horizon, spinning a tale of empty liaisons over sputtering saxophone and ambling drums. Snapshots of past lives help contextualize the true love found elsewhere. After the character sketch of “Phantom” works as prologue, “White Lightning” is opening credits for everything Beatty explores throughout the album: “”You’re the first of your kind/ And the last on my lips.”  While many of these songs are tributes to his partner, Sweet Fortune is not simply a love album. Just as often, Beatty wrangles with distance, the longing of wanting to be in a specific place with a specific person and yet finding yourself basically everywhere else possible. The rippling shuffle of “Too Many Ways” meditates on lives divided between coasts, and how much time you spend saying goodbye to the ones you love when you’re always on the road to the next destination. Beatty knows that, too, is a part of himself he doesn’t quite want to let go. In the rollicking Amy Allen co-write “Virtuoso,” he admits there’s exhilaration in being the one on the move, the traveling artist: “I’m not an empty gun/ I’m the bullet flying away.” Even with the confessional qualities of his past work, Sweet Fortune is unvarnished and unafraid. Beatty found the most clever, poignant things he had to say were the simple truth and in turn he found writing itself transformed for him. It’s the album he could only make now, after all the roads traveled: comfortable in himself, his clearest artistic vision yet, able to reflect on the past and the present in real time, arriving with a multi-faceted reckoning with what it means to welcome someone else into our lives. In the past, writing albums was often a painful experience. When Ryan Beatty was making Sweet Fortune, he was smiling to himself the whole time.