The singer-songwriter's fourth album goes deep into his feelings without over-intellectualizing them and finds a secret weapon in Clairo

Ryan Beatty is trying to find the right way to say “I love you” on “Secret Language,” the rustic, horn-backed lead single from his fourth album, Sweet Fortune. He admits early on, “I’m a bit of a mess cause I’m fragile and tired, wounded and weak, and my words are a useless defense.” And yet words are all he has. 

Over the past few years, Beatty has quietly positioned himself as a virtuosic songwriter operating on the fringes of pop. The roots he put down on his 2018 debut Boy in Jeans showed promise that continued on the more experimental Dreaming of David in 2020. But Calico, his breakthrough from 2023, was a treasure trove of chilling revelations and picturesque stories about loss and finality. His writing on Calico is uncomplicated without being overly plain, in a way that suggests a deep familiarity with emotional minefields. 

It seems obvious — they’re his own feelings and his own experiences, so of course he would know which memories are most explosive, or which have wreaked the most havoc in his life. The point, though, is that on Calico, he’d already spent enough time excavating his past to write about it from a distance. It’s the biggest contrast from Sweet Fortune, a record that spends 10 tracks fighting to hold onto the present and love that might not last beyond the moment in which he finds it.

In real time, Beatty outlines his fears and uncertainties with reluctant optimism. “You can stay if you don’t break my heart,” he sings on “White Lighting.” “Sometimes I don’t know what I want until you take it away.” There are moments where Beatty can’t contain his own desire. “Knowing there’s nothing I can do, I would pay the cost for every loss so I don’t lose you,” he sings on the closing track “Fleur De Lis.” “And I would love the both of us for you/If only I could love the both of us for you.” He’d do anything to keep this love from turning into what he seems to fear most: a blip that turns into memories he’ll have to spend years making sense of.

Sweet Fortune finds Beatty unguarded. His words act as armor — he accepts his anxieties about being alone, even considers how lingering religious shame could factor into how present he allows himself to be in his relationships. But he also doesn’t dismiss the need he feels to fill that space. Solitude isn’t what he wants — he craves touch, familiarity, and the kind of all-consuming attention that he might have shied away from in the past.

Hesitation makes him a flight risk on “Virtuoso,” a backwoods country song laced with swelling strings. “Just because I gotta leave you here doesn’t mean I love you less,” he sings. “Trying to hold me down is like holding onto rain/I’m not an empty gun, I’m the bullet flying away.” Like “Secret Language,” the track carries the influence of the time Beatty spent digging into country music while working on Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter. The singer-songwriter earned his first Grammy Award for Album of the Year for his work on “Bodyguard,” “Protector,” “Just for Fun,” and “II Hands II Heaven.” 

Sweet Fortune finds its own secret weapon in Clairo; she appears across the credits on nearly half of the record. Her soft tone glides beneath his own on “Sweet Fortune,” a brief moment of emotional surrender midway through the album. “Be good to me,” their layered vocals plead. “Don’t say what you don’t mean.” 

Beatty holds himself to this on “Too Many Ways,” where he gathers a crowd of instrumentalists for a sprawling folktale about loving from a distance. “I’ve got a life in California and a family and a band,” he sings. The band, in this case, contributes a banjo ukulele, an organ, and a pedal steel guitar, among other things, to get that country feeling just right. Beatty brings it home with an anecdote about the man from Massachusetts he never seems to get enough time with. “He said, ‘It’s cold rain and winter frost in Boston, but my arms will keep you warm tonight.’” 

Sweet Fortune finds one of its sweetest moments in “Dust,” a stripped-back ballad that cradles the musician’s sharpest vocal arrangement on the album. There’s an ease to his performance that contrasts sharply with his writing. “Love of mine, don’t cry for me/love of mine, don’t die for me/even if I ask you to,” he sings. “You’re the last thing I’ve left to lose.”

The song reflects his live shows, where enthralled crowds sing along in a fragile whisper. Beatty is often seated for these performances, surrounded by his band and lost in the moment. The opening piano ballad “Phantom” lends itself to this structure, as does the bluesy “Annie, Anything,” two instances in which he almost feels too comfortable compared to the rest of the album. These cuts can come off as less challenging than the more intriguing explorations of his ear for arrangements.

“Delancey” dispels this feeling. It makes itself at home in the dark corner of a jazz club, the kind that offers refuge on rainy nights in New York City. “I’m as dim as a deer you left dead in the road,” Beatty sings. He grasps for something more meaningful in what sounds like sirens blaring from a distance in the back. They’re tucked just behind a stirring saxophone performance. 

Four albums in, Beatty is still finding new angles through his distinct perspective. Sweet Fortune revels in its intimacy without over-intellectualizing it. And while it falls just short of the heights Calico reached, the album accepts the challenge of trusting the full spectrum of emotion and experience that fuels him as a songwriter.

There’s a moment on Calico, on the closing track titled “Little Faith,” where Beatty sings about plants that keep withering and dying under his care. “I didn’t want to be a killer,” he says, “but it died right there that day.” By the end of Sweet Fortune, Beatty doesn’t give into defeat as easily. He finds a new way to flourish, instead. “I’ll throw seeds and reap what I sow,” he sings on “Fleur De Lis.” “‘Cause in the dirt, all my flowers will grow.”