Ryan Beatty calls it a core memory: listening to the Dixie Chicks’ “Ready to Run” on repeat as he rode with his family in their big blue van back home to California after a trip to Utah.
“Oh my God, I was obsessed with that song,” he says now of the late ’90s country hit, in which the Chicks sing about being runaway brides over a rollicking string-band groove. “Just listened to it again and again and again.”
A couple of decades later, Beatty is about to release an extraordinary new album with a bit of “Ready to Run” energy in it. On “Sweet Fortune,” his fourth LP, this 30-year-old singer and songwriter pulls from the country music that shaped him as a kid growing up in Fresno County before he ventured south to try to make it as a pop star in Hollywood. The music video for the album’s rootsy lead single, “Secret Language,” shows him literally sprinting across the United States in a pair of battered cowboy boots — from the blue skies and bougainvillea of Los Angeles, through the deserted expanses of the dusty Southwest, to a landing spot on a bench overlooking Boston’s Charles River.
Yet instead of singing about running away from love, Beatty — a Grammy winner thanks to his songwriting work on Beyoncé’s “Cowboy Carter” — describes opening himself to it: “Sweet Fortune” maps the emotional contours of a long-distance relationship between the singer in L.A. and his man in Massachusetts. There’s a song about borrowing your partner’s clothes; there’s a song about reunion sex (several, actually); there’s a song about knowing “so many ways to say ‘I love you’” and “too many ways to say goodbye.”
The album doesn’t skip over the strains of a “love held with lonely hands,” as Beatty puts it in the stately “Phantom.” But for the most part “Sweet Fortune” exults in romance — a shift from the singer’s previous record, 2023’s “Calico,” on which he brooded over a painful breakup.
“Doing those songs on tour was really hard,” Beatty says over a cup of tea on a recent afternoon at a Silver Lake diner. “They were still fresh for me — that bruise was still real — and every night doing the show, I felt like I was tapping back into that place as authentically as I could. So to make a record now that feels as emotional and deep, but it’s not about heartbreak — that felt exciting.”
Beatty’s new perspective comes accompanied by a development of his musical approach: Where his vocals were veiled and whispery on “Calico,” here his singing is front and center against arrangements lush with banjo, Dobro and pedal steel. Ethan Gruska, who produced “Sweet Fortune” and “Calico” with Beatty, says the sonic idea this time was “leading man country” à la Glen Campbell, whose gleaming late ’60s hits echo throughout songs like “Too Many Ways” and “Annie, Anything.”
“It’s freaky hearing Ryan on the mic through headphones,” Gruska says. The producer, who’s also known for his work with Phoebe Bridgers and Shawn Mendes, remembers the first time they made music in the studio. “I turned around and was like, ‘You’re the best singer I’ve ever heard.’”
Beatty says James Taylor in “Sweet Baby James” was the first voice he tried to emulate when he was young, and that folky tenderness is definitely still in there. But so too is the idiosyncratic R&B phrasing of a Frank Ocean or a Justin Bieber, as in “Delancey,” where he’s describing a late-night rendezvous — “Out of breath, on all fours / Felt good in the moment, nothing more” — like someone fogging up a bathroom mirror.
“That was one of the first songs I made for this record,” he says of “Delancey,” thinking back to a writing trip he took to New York. “That first verse fell right off the bone.”
One of six siblings, Beatty was born into the Mormon Church, an experience he says he’s “still sort of untangling” 10 years after he came out as gay. (“I said, ‘Now, let’s not make this hard,’” he sings in “White Lightning,” “It’s my religious shame that keeps me on guard.”)
“To unlearn certain things is really tricky,” he says at the diner. “I view it as something I’ll actively do through my life.” Does he believe in God? “I don’t even know how to answer that,” Beatty says with a little laugh. “I believe in the things I’m connected to, and sometimes those things can’t be defined or put into words but can be felt.”
When Beatty was 15, he moved to L.A. to pursue music and found moderate success as a kind of burgeoning Radio Disney heartthrob. He toured with the pop star Cody Simpson and flirted with a girl on the beach in the video for his song “Hey L.A.”; a 2012 article in the San Diego Union-Tribune describes Beatty’s trip to Carlsbad’s La Costa Canyon High School to sing for a freshman who’d been diagnosed with a rare form of bone cancer.
Ryan Beatty in Silver Lake.
(Evan Mulling / For The Times)
Beatty looks back philosophically at this phase of his life. “I was so young, but I embrace it now,” he says. “Things happened how they had to have happened for me to be the artist I am right now.” I tell him about an excruciating radio interview I found on YouTube where the DJ keeps prodding 17-year-old Beatty about “how to pick up the ladies.” He knows the one.
“It’s hard to be grateful for times that felt uncomfortable,” he says. “But I think that’s also where I built this armor that I have — this knowingness of why I do what I do. It’s how I have this grit to stick to it.”
In 2017, Beatty appeared on the song “Queer” by the hip-hop boy band Brockhampton; other collaborations followed with the likes of Tyler, the Creator and Benny Blanco. In addition to Beyoncé, he’s written songs with Marcus Mumford and with Miley Cyrus, who told Apple Music’s Zane Lowe that she called Beatty when she couldn’t find a few lines for the title track of last year’s “Something Beautiful.”
“I knew that Ryan had them,” Cyrus said. “It’s like a Marvel movie or something, where you know they have the jewel.”
Beatty’s lyrics are filled with strong images and evocative phrases — the paint chipping off a “white picket dream” in the new album’s “Fleur de Lis,” for instance. Yet he says he was insecure about his writing for years because he didn’t go to college. “I graduated online high school — I was touring at the time,” he says. “Then I realized that songwriting isn’t necessarily about what makes sense but what feels true.”
Given the intensely personal nature of his own music, how does he handle getting notes back from the pop stars with whom he writes? “I’ll be honest with you,” he says, grinning. “That’s very rarely happened.”
For “Sweet Fortune,” Beatty maintained that collaborative spirit, welcoming Clairo and the songwriter Amy Allen into his sessions; players on the album include the drummer Matt Chamberlain and the guitarist Meg Duffy. Capturing the right vocal performances was an arduous process, the singer admits, adding that he did more than 100 takes of some of the songs.
“You have to feel it in your bones,” he says. “It’s funny, me and my friend were just talking about this because we go to drag shows all the time — my little brother’s a drag queen — and even when a queen is lip-syncing, it can come from the center of themselves. This isn’t their song — it has nothing to do with them. But if they connect to it emotionally, you feel it in the room.”
As open as he is in his music, Beatty is figuring out how open he wants to be as a public figure. He doesn’t reveal much about his personal life on social media, and when I ask him what led him to call one song “Virtuoso” — it’s a frisky uptempo number with mentions of a “veteran drummer” and “rookie clarinets” — he says he’d rather not say.
“I like to leave a lot of space for the listener to find the answers themselves rather than answer it for them,” he says. (One telling lyric from “Dust”: “I love to sing / I hate the sport / I gave it all away / And now I have nothing more.”)
Still, “I certainly have ambitions,” says Beatty, who shares a manager with the widely obsessed-over Bridgers. This fall he’ll tour North America and Europe behind “Sweet Fortune” — shows he says he’s looking forward to performing more actively than he did on the road with “Calico,” where “the whole time I was sitting down with my eyes closed, almost curled up into a ball.”
As we talk, Paul Simon’s “50 Ways to Leave Your Lover” comes floating out over the diner’s sound system, and Beatty tilts his head to take it in. “I’ve been listening to a lot of ‘Hearts and Bones’ recently,” he says of the title cut from Simon’s cult-fave 1983 LP — another traveling song Simon wrote about his relationship with Carrie Fisher.
“That song is so gorgeous,” Beatty adds. “His career is one I look at and admire for sure. So many records that go so many different places.” He listens a little more. “That’s the kind of career I hope to have.”
This story originally appeared on LA Times
