In a music landscape currently built on oversaturation and instant gratification, Ryan Beatty is taking the long road. With Sweet Fortune, his fourth studio album, the 30-year-old singer-songwriter sounds more patient, more exacting, and more emotionally lucid than ever—an artist uninterested in chasing noise when he can build a world of his own instead: “Make it […]
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In a music landscape currently built on oversaturation and instant gratification, Ryan Beatty is taking the long road. With Sweet Fortune, his fourth studio album, the 30-year-old singer-songwriter sounds more patient, more exacting, and more emotionally lucid than ever—an artist uninterested in chasing noise when he can build a world of his own instead: “Make it about the song. Write great songs.”
That world is one Beatty has been refining for years. His last solo album, 2023’s Calico, was widely praised as one of the year’s best: a devastatingly beautiful collection of songs that married poetic songwriting with cinematic, often gutting instrumentation. For many artists, a record that beloved can become something to measure against.
Sweet Fortune never sounds burdened by that pressure.
If anything, Sweet Fortune feels like a natural expansion of the same emotional and sonic universe Beatty built on Calico—once again with producer Ethan Gruska—but with a new center of gravity. Where Calico often moved in the aftermath of a love, Sweet Fortune lives in the present tense. It is a love album, but not an uncomplicated one: throughout the record, Beatty writes from within a relationship shaped by distance, longing, and devotion. That shift alone posed a new kind of challenge. Heartbreak has long been treated as fertile creative ground for artists, but writing about a love that is still actively unfolding—especially one you want to protect—requires a different kind of precision.
“Heartbreak allows so much fantasy and the what-ifs or what could have been,” Beatty tells L’OFFICIEL. “But when you’re in something that’s really beautiful, to talk about that… it feels like sometimes talking about it almost does it a disservice.”
That carefulness became part of the album’s DNA. “I was sort of early on treading lightly because I was like, how do I put words into something that I hold really sacred?”
That tension—between intimacy and restraint, devotion and distance—is what gives Sweet Fortune its pulse. Beatty’s songs don’t flatten love into something easy or sentimental; instead, they let it remain vast, disorienting, and occasionally unknowable. The result is easily one of his best records yet: lush, cinematic, and deeply felt, with Beatty sounding not only like an artist in full command of his voice, but one still humble enough to follow the song wherever it leads.
“To be in love, there’s a lot of luck in some ways—you never know when somebody is gonna come into your life and surprise you.”
The first track on Sweet Fortune also, fittingly, happened to be the first one Beatty wrote for the album. In his words, “Phantom” is one of the most theatrical songs he’s made to date, setting the stage—and really the entire emotional skeleton—for everything that follows. It feels like the opening of the curtains on a beautiful, devastating show that’s about to unfold in front of you.
There are peaks and valleys all over Sweet Fortune, but the album never loses sight of its central ache: the longing that comes with loving someone from a distance. “Virtuoso“ and “ Too Many Ways,” two of the record’s most upbeat and Americana-leaning tracks, stand out in particular. When I mentioned to Beatty that it felt like the perfect example of what the internet would probably call “y’allternative,” he laughed—though, frankly, I stand by it.
When I asked about the musical influences behind that side of the album, Beatty’s list kept growing, and it was a very good list at that: Lucinda Williams, Judy Sill, Willie Nelson—then, before we wrapped, one last addendum. “Oh, and also Glen Campbell, as well as Harry Nilsson,” he said with a laugh. “Just needed to add that to the list.”
Another standout declaration of love arrives on “White Lightning,” and of course, the unforgettable title track „Sweet Fortune,“ both songs capturing the almost impossible feeling of finding the right person at the right time. Both of the songs frame love as something both rare, lucky, and electric—lightning in a bottle, if you will—and he’s not letting it get away.
„he’s bright when everything dims / and no one is mine / if no one is him“ he sings on „White Lightning.“
Some of the coldest moments on Sweet Fortune—and also some of my favorites—come from “Delancey” and “Dust.” They live in the ache of being away from the person you want most, that never-ending feeling of distance stretching itself out longer than it should. In both songs, New York becomes its own kind of central character, a city through which Beatty vocalizes his devotion from miles away.
“if it’s not all for you / what do I do it for?” he sings on “Dust.”
And while some of the album’s saddest moments are tied to New York, Beatty still looks back on that period beautifully. It’s also where much of the record came together alongside Claire Cottrill—better known professionally as Clairo—who appears throughout the album with writing credits and soft background vocals. You can hear her on the title track, “Sweet Fortune,” and in the whispered “I love you”s tucked into “Too Many Ways,” one of Beatty’s favorite moments on the album, and even recalls getting chills when he heard it complete with Clairo’s voice. The two had been friends for years, but it wasn’t until heading into 2025 that Beatty finally suggested they get in the studio together.
“In the past, I’ve always been sort of protective over who I let in the room or whatnot,” he tells me, “almost… resistant to collaboration in a way.”
That resistance surprised me a bit, considering Beatty’s long history of working with others—whether through his past collaborations with Brockhampton or, more recently, his Grammy-winning work co-writing four songs on Cowboy Carter. But his hesitation makes more sense in the context of his solo work, which feels deeply personal. Beatty is an exceptional songwriter for other artists, but arguably at his most compelling when it comes to his own records, where every feeling is his to unravel. Writing for others, he explains, allowed him to let go of some of that pressure. “Ego is the enemy of creation,” he says, a mindset that eventually made its way back into his solo process too, giving Sweet Fortune some of the lightness he didn’t know he had in him.
„Ego is the enemy to creation.“
Even in the middle of collaboration, production, and the full press churn that comes with releasing a record like Sweet Fortune, Beatty’s philosophy remains surprisingly simple: “I always want to write about the truth… I want to look back on these records I’ve made and have them serve as a reminder of where I was at that time in my life.”
After the album’s more melancholic moments, love finds its way back in, as it always does. “Fleur De Lis,” the final track on Sweet Fortune, feels like the record exhaling—a hopeful ending to something so often marked by distance, and one of the most difficult songs Beatty had to finish.
“That last 30 seconds of the album was my favorite part of the record,” he says. “With that huge guitar solo, it feels like fist up in the air, like, this big proclamation in a way.”
And a proclamation it is. Sweet Fortune understands that the most beautiful things rarely arrive without a little mess first—that flowers still have to push through dirt, that love asks for patience as much as passion, and that devotion can still bloom even in absence. Beatty has made a record about longing, yes, but more importantly, he’s made one about what survives it.
