Just a few weeks ago, Ryan Beatty had the best music recital of his life.
The 31-year-old was at L.A.’s Greek Theatre, playing a headlining set on his Arms over Armor Tour before a crowd of over 5,000, a major full-circle moment taking to the iconic venue for the biggest hometown show he’s played to date.
“That’s what I was saying on stage, it’s like a recital,” Beatty says over the phone, calling in from Texas on his off day between show dates. “I’m in a suit, all my friends and family were there. The crowd was insane, it was so inspiring. It made me fall in love with performing again in some ways.”
The Greek was a markedly larger show than his last L.A. gig a couple months prior — an underplay at the Masonic Lodge at Hollywood Forever Cemetery — where he was showcasing some of the highlights from his latest album Sweet Fortune, his gorgeous pop-meets-folk-meets R&B record capturing the jubilance and warmth of a relationship.
It’s an about-face from 2023’s Calico, itself about a breakup. Like many songwriters who’ve ever poured their romantic sorrows out in their music, the challenge in this new era was getting acquainted with writing from a place of happiness instead, which can be a source of anxiety itself.
“I think when you’ve been living in the same state of longing, hoping and wanting and facing heartbreak, when something positive happens, it’s almost more uncomfortable than the feeling you’d been used to,” he says. “When I felt like I was in something good and beautiful, I wanted to protect it, I was afraid to write about it because I hadn’t done that before. And ultimately, I wanted to make sure I was honoring it in a way that I could stand by.”
Beatty, whose collaborators on the album include Clairo and longtime producer collaborator Ethan Gruska, says he was looking to “speak romantically in a sonic way” with his latest. Perhaps most fitting for an album about blooming love, flowers are one of Sweet Fortune’s more notable motifs, whether it’s on the first song “Phantom,” where Beatty’s subject “parodies the spring and wilts away,” or on the final track “Fleur De Lis,” as Beatty croons about how a couple will “bloom together or wither alone,” finishing the chorus as he sings “I’ll throw seeds and reap what I sow / ‘cause in the dirt, all my flowers will grow.”
“I think it reflects on how sensitive a garden can be, and anything beautiful you have to tend to to keep it alive, whether that’s a relationship or something else you believe in,” Beatty says. “I think with ‘Fleur De Lis,’ I think I closed out the album in a really beautiful way. Ultimately it’s saying I have to tend to the things that maybe are hard to face or take a risk on. And that’s the message I wanted to leave the listener with.”
Beatty grew up in the suburbs of Fresno and moved down to Los Angeles as a teenager to pursue his musical career. First gaining prominence with covers on YouTube, he’d begun to build momentum on the radio disney circuit, marketed as a more traditional young teen pop star and inspiring comparisons as the sort of next Justin Bieber. But by 2013 at age 18, he left that path behind, and legal skirmishes with his old management and record label kept him from releasing music until 2016.
He would find his own way, and the following years would prove much more artistically fruitful than what is often available for a young artist in the mainstream pop machine. He became a frequent collaborator with rap collective Brockhampton, provided backing vocals on Tyler, the Creator’s Grammy-winning Igor and co-wrote four songs on Beyonce’s Cowboy Carter, including fan favorite “Bodyguard.”
He’s dropped four solo albums, starting with his lauded self-released Boy in Jeans in 2018, followed by 2020’s Dreaming of David, then Calico and now Sweet Fortune.
His work as a songwriter won him a Grammy for album of the year with Cowboy Carter, though Beatty himself calls writing for other artists “a happy accident,” adding that while he isn’t opposed to taking more sessions writing for himself “is the thing I’ll do for the rest of my life.”
“It’s definitely a different muscle, but it shares the same sentiment, which is that I have to feel completely connected to it, and when you’re writing for someone else, you have to have the realization that you are not ever going to fully know their perspective, you can’t be fully in their head. [Writing for other artists] is nice because it lets you take a break from being totally in your head about yourself and lets you try things you might not try for yourself.”
Beatty is 20 shows into the Arms Over Armor tour and has just over a dozen shows left for the year, including a sold-out New York gig at Brooklyn Paramount on Saturday. More than halfway through, Beatty says the focus has been keeping the concerts fresh, experimenting with melodies on songs and leaning into the live dynamic.
“I think the love songs really connect live,” Beatty says. “Looking out into the crowd and seeing couples holding each other as they’re listening to ‘Sweet Fortune’ or ‘Too Many Ways,’ there’s so much sweetness in the room.”
He’ll finally get some reprieve next month after wrapping a 10-date run across Europe and the U.K. in London on November 7. It’s too early for Beatty to give any hard commitments for what comes after that. For now, Beatty says, “I just have to take it one day at a time.”