How Ryan Beatty learned to love a love song

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Ryan Beatty calls it a core memory: listening to the Dixie Chicks’ “Ready to Run” on repeat as he rode with his family in their big blue van back home to California after a trip to Utah.“Oh my God, I was obsessed with that song,” he says now of the late ’90s country hit, in which the Chicks sing about being runaway brides over a rollicking string-band groove.“Just listened to it again and again and again.”A couple of decades later, Beatty is about to release an extraordinary new album with a bit of “Ready to Run” energy in it.

On “Sweet Fortune,” his fourth LP, this 30-year-old singer and songwriter pulls from the country music that shaped him as a kid growing up in Fresno County before he ventured south to try to make it as a pop star in Hollywood.The music video for the album’s rootsy lead single, “Secret Language,” shows him literally sprinting across the United States in a pair of battered cowboy boots — from the blue skies and bougainvillea of Los Angeles, through the deserted expanses of the dusty Southwest, to a landing spot on a bench overlooking Boston’s Charles River.Yet instead of singing about running away from love, Beatty — a Grammy winner thanks to his songwriting work on Beyoncé’s “Cowboy Carter” — describes opening himself to it: “Sweet Fortune” maps the emotional contours of a long-distance relationship between the singer in L.A.

and his man in Massachusetts.There’s a song about borrowing your partner’s clothes; there’s a song about reunion sex (several, actually); there’s a song about knowing “so many ways to say ‘I love you’” and “too many ways to say goodbye.”The album doesn’t skip over the strains of a “love held with lonely hands,” as Beatty puts it in the stately “Phantom.” But for the most part “Sweet Fortune” exults in romance — a shift from the singer’s previous reco...