Ryan Beatty - Sweet Fortune - [CD]

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.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.”