Ryan Beatty's 'Sweet Fortune' Trades Grief for Happiness. Clairo Shows Up for Half of It.

Ryan Beatty made his name writing other people's grief and his own. The new record is the one where he lets himself be happy, and it turns out that is the harder thing to sing about.

Sweet Fortune, out today, is Beatty's fourth album. It follows Calico, the 2023 record that turned a former Brockhampton hook-slinger into one of the more careful songwriters working the edge of pop. Calico was a breakup album that examined the breakup from a safe distance, turning every detail over like a stone you already know the weight of. Sweet Fortune does the opposite. It is in love, in the present tense, and scared the whole feeling could vanish before the last track ends.

Where this sits in his run

The short version of Beatty's career is that he keeps shedding skins. Boy in Jeans (2018) and Dreaming of David (2020) sold him as a pop kid moonlighting as an alt-R&B crooner. Calico was the swerve into hushed, literate Americana that made critics pay attention. In between, he picked up an Album of the Year Grammy for his songwriting on Beyoncé's Cowboy Carter, where he has credits on "Bodyguard," "Protector," "Just for Fun," and "II Hands II Heaven." You can hear what that work taught him. Country phrasing, pedal steel, the patience to let a song saunter instead of sprint.

He produced Sweet Fortune again with Ethan Gruska, who also built Calico and has worked with Phoebe Bridgers and Olivia Rodrigo. The two of them widen the frame this time. Where Calico was mostly guitar and air, Sweet Fortune brings in brass, woodwinds, organ, strings. Beatty has named Lucinda Williams and Little Feat as touchstones, and the lushness tracks. This is a warmer, more crowded room than he has let us into before.

The peaks

The best song here is "Too Many Ways," a sprawling folktale about loving someone two time zones away. Beatty stacks a banjo ukulele, an organ, and a pedal steel under a story about a man from Massachusetts he never gets enough hours with, and lands it on a line the guy says back to him: "It's cold rain and winter frost in Boston, but my arms will keep you warm tonight." It is specific in the way the whole album wants to be, and the arrangement does as much narrating as the lyric.

"Delancey" is the other one that sticks. It sets up in the back corner of a jazz club, saxophone smearing through the mix while something that sounds like a far-off siren bleeds in behind it. "I'm as dim as a deer you left dead in the road," Beatty sings, which is an ugly, good image, and the band lets it sit there. "Dust" is the quietest win, a stripped ballad built around the sharpest vocal arrangement on the record: "Love of mine, don't cry for me / Love of mine, don't die for me / Even if I ask you to." And "Virtuoso," a backwoods country tune wrapped in swelling strings, has the album's best piece of self-diagnosis: "I'm not an empty gun, I'm the bullet flying away."

Clairo, the secret weapon

Clairo is all over this thing, and she earns the credit. She turns up across nearly half the album, co-writing the title track and "Delancey" and singing on "White Lightning" and "Too Many Ways." On the title cut her tone slides under Beatty's for a quick stretch of surrender ("Be good to me / Don't say what you don't mean"), and the harmony does something his voice alone does not. Beatty has said she and Gruska pushed him further into the confessional. The record bears that out. The most exposed lines tend to land next to her.

Where it sags

Happiness has a cost here, and it is edge. A couple of tracks get so comfortable they stop pulling. "Phantom," the opening piano ballad, is pretty and a little inert, more mood than song. "Annie, Anything," the bluesy cut, drifts the same way. Both are pleasant. Neither challenges him the way his arrangements do everywhere else, and on a 10-track album that asks you to live inside small moments, two soft spots in a row is something you feel. Calico did not have this problem, because grief kept the tension wound tight. Contentment is a looser spring.

The verdict

Sweet Fortune does not top Calico, and it knows it. What it does is prove Beatty can write from joy without going saccharine or vague, which is a genuinely tricky assignment that wrecks a lot of good songwriters. The peaks ("Too Many Ways," "Delancey," "Dust") sit right up with his best, the production is the richest he has put his name to, and the Clairo partnership is worth keeping around. He takes it on the road this fall under the banner "Arms Over Armor," which is about right. This is the sound of someone finally standing up at his own show instead of curling into a ball.

A strong fourth album, a half-step under his best, and the rare happy record that does not get boring while it is happy.