It’s the kind of day in Manhattan where subway stations turn into saunas, the air thick with humidity and every other oddity that defines summer in the city. Despite the sticky weather, an undaunted crowd is forming outside of the Lower East Side’s cramped Nightclub 101, a year-and-change-old venue where a fledgling artist might play one of their first gigs. Tonight, however, singer-songwriter Ryan Beatty is taking the stage — an outlier for 101 as Beatty is anything but fledgling.
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For one, does the name Beyoncé ring a bell? Beatty was part of the creative team that helped the superstar win album of the year at the Grammys in 2025, co-writing a handful of tracks on Cowboy Carter, including fan-favorite “Bodyguard.” But enough about that. Beatty is here as part of a series of underplays across the world for his own music, which caught Beyoncé’s ear to begin with. The tiny gigs are in support of his fourth album Sweet Fortune, which came out in June.
Walking down 101’s narrow staircase, Beatty is in a small basement. His set is delayed (technical issues), but he’s relaxed. With a baby face defying the fact he’s turning 31 next month, Beatty dons a worn jean jacket and blue jeans, perhaps an allusion to the country twang that can be heard on Sweet Fortune. (“Virtuoso,” co-written with pop hitmaker Amy Allen, with its guitar pickin’ and steady beat, would be perfect for a line dance.) But while the album may convey a subtle Southern energy (its series of music videos were filmed in the heartland, including “White Lightning” which improbably featured an actual lightning storm), Sweet Fortune actually took root not far from where we’re sitting. “I just felt like I needed something to really take me out of my comfort zone,” he says, closing his eyes while he answers each question to hyperfocus on the words coming out of his mouth. “A change of location is an easy way to do that. I have friends in New York and my favorite spots, but I never created here. I wanted to see what it was like.”
While the recording was done back in L.A., Beatty wrote the bulk of Sweet Fortune in the dead of a Northeast winter; at the time he says he was listening to a lot of Chet Baker. “It’s that cliché thing of, ‘I’m listening to jazz in New York!’ I think it opened me up sonically.” He looks at the album as “California dressed up in New York clothes. I’m a California boy through-and-through, and I just feel that it bleeds into my songwriting. The album is really about distance, so making it in a place far away from my comfort, my home, allowed me to speak on that more directly.” Then again, there’s another theme on Sweet Fortune that perhaps is much more important. “I always know that no matter what, I have to sing about what’s really happening in my life. And even though I’m really protective of the things that I keep precious, singing about a relationship I’m in — and not from a place of heartbreak — was a new thing for me.”
From the minute he says he can remember anything, music was always a guiding light for Beatty during a childhood growing up outside Fresno, the California town far removed from both San Francisco to the north and Los Angeles to the south. “I always knew it was a magnet for me and that I was gonna find myself somewhere in it,” he says. That passion evolved into Beatty posting YouTube covers and eventually launching a pop career as a teen artist, his songs on Disney Radio. (Ryan Seacrest debuted his first official single.)
As he’s been open about before, it’s a period he doesn’t fondly look back on. “I think, ‘Did I even have any say in the matter?’ Not that anyone was forcing me. I was a kid, discovering who I was, and I didn’t know who I was. I knew at one point early on as that was happening that there’s something deeper that I yearned for that I could not achieve based on everything around me and what I was doing.” He points to “years of shame” and a grit he utilized to push through. When Beatty cut ties with his first label, he couldn’t release music for a period of time. “The years that I’d spent not making music, from when I was 17 to 21, were really hard,” he says. “That was a dark era of my life just because of how lost I felt. I was alone and scared and tethered to nothing. I think it also allowed me to find my voice, but it took a long time.”
Beatty wasn’t just unhappy churning out bubblegum pop: he was also grappling with his sexuality. Launching a career as a young performer added a separate layer of turmoil. By 2016, when he came out in an Instagram post, Beatty said he could “finally breathe,” adding, “It’s taken 20 years of suffocating in the closet for me to become comfortable enough to say it.” Today, he’s living in acceptance of his journey. Not only did it let him zero in on his craft rather than chasing the poison apple of fame, but the same year he came out he released his acclaimed debut album, Boy in Jeans, which earned him street cred and deftly shed his pop past. (The fact he was also collaborating with BROCKHAMPTON at the time didn’t hurt either.) “I had to make one thing in order to make the next album, and the next one and now Sweet Fortune. It’s like, everything for a reason. It’s cliché, but it’s true.”
Beatty says singing about gay experiences is so second nature to him that he almost forgets it’s a part of who he is. “It’s not that I don’t think about it, but I get messages all the time where people are like, ‘Where I’m from, I can’t be myself, and hearing your music or living with your art allows me to feel these things.’ That means a lot to me. Those are the moments where I get reminded of like, ‘Oh, this matters to people.’” I mention to Beatty that it seems like there are less opportunities for gay artists than pre-pandemic days, especially considering the current political climate. “Yeah, it’s interesting how things can slowly change; one day you look around and you’re like, ‘Things feel different.’ But I agree with you. It’s hard for me to answer that right now because I feel like it’s something in hindsight I’ll be able to notice, but you’re not wrong.”
The first song Beatty wrote for Sweet Fortune was its title track, a duet with close friend and collaborator Clairo, who also serves as cowriter. (She later surprised the crowd and joined Beatty during his 101 set.) “Sweet Fortune” is also the first song he wrote about his boyfriend. “I think it gave me the permission of, ‘Oh, I can sing about this person, and I can sing about my experience with this feeling in a way that feels challenging but safe and protected but exposed.’ It snowballed after that,” he says. “It was hard because with heartbreak, you can dress it up in a song in so many ways. But being in a current relationship, I found it more challenging for a lot of different reasons.” Still, Beatty’s optimism beams through, especially on lead single “Secret Language,” which comes complete with Beatles-esque horns which triumphantly announce themselves as the track crescendos. “You seduce what I always suppress,” he sings.
Now, Beatty is dealing with a different kind of anxiety: presenting these songs for his boyfriend. “It’s awkward at first,” he says with a laugh. “It’s not like I prefaced it with like, ‘I wrote this thing about you or about us.’ They’re actually not meant to be taken literally like a diary. Sometimes it’s just about a feeling that exists between us.” At the same time, he’s honest about the process. “I take my music really seriously, so to have fun making it is rare for me. I know that sounds dramatic, but it can be really painful, and it can be really hard for so many reasons.” Now, however, whether it’s writing for Beyoncé or his treatise on happiness Sweet Fortune, Beatty is learning to take his wins.
“What I’m really trying to practice is holding onto those diamonds that arrive in the palm of your hand after so much hard work.” With that, there’s a knock on the door. It’s showtime.