Inside The Credits 061: Ryan Beatty & Ethan Gruska
What Ryan Beatty & Ethan Gruska Did With Calico Still Blows My Mind
This post is long overdue. I started doing Inside The Credits at the top of 2024 and was locked in on coming out of the gate with producers with big catalogs and cool patterns I’d noticed. I was also focused on staying reactive to music that was coming out in real time. So some projects, and the producers who made them, slipped by the wayside as far as me diving deep on their instrumental impact. My favorite album of 2023, and perhaps all the 2020s thus far, is Ryan Beatty’s Calico. This album has two main producers—Beatty himself and Ethan Gruska. Somehow I got distracted and haven’t highlighted their work on this monumental album til now.
Beatty has limited production credits before Calico besides for his own album right before it, Dreaming of David. For others, Beatty has and continues to be a prominent songwriter and composer though, and has worked with a plethora of people from Brockhampton to Tyler, The Creator to Beyoncé.
Gruska on the other hand has been quite the go to producer within a certain ilk of alt folk pop rock. Pre Calico (his sole work with Beatty), he produced for Weezer, Paul McCartney, Remi Wolf, & Phoebe Bridgers and since has locked in with Shawn Mendes, Lizzy McAlpine, Boygenius, and Cold War Kids. As much range as exists within these lists of artists there is a throughline—Gruska boosts the work of poetic and sleek songwriters.
Calico is a generational project to my ears. It lives in the space of other bodies of work that have been released in my lifetime like Sade’s Love Deluxe, Frank Ocean’s Blonde, and The Avett Brothers’ Emotionalism. It’s as meditative as it is poignant and as grounded as it is lofty. The only way to truly honor its prowess is to go track by track and analyze Beatty and Gruska’s production finesse.
“Ribbons”
The creep in of a dusty piano is one of the most grabbing intros, due to its softness and simplicity, that I've ever heard. All of the other instruments also creep and swirl into the soundscape. This includes guitar, strings, and drums. The strings take on the most dominating presence mid-song and seem to chronicle the building poignancy of Beatty’s catharsis.
“Bruises Off The Peach”
The strings maintain their core presence here leading into the vocals aligned with acoustic guitar strums. This song is an exercise in restraint to lift an ethereal set of vocals that deserve the majority of the sonic space. Drums do enter around the two minute mark with what sounds like a banjo, but they only exist as a solidifying rhythm rather than their own entity.
“Cinnamon Bread”
Here Gruska and Beatty solely bring the acoustic guitar from the prior song to the intro of this one. They slide it into glittering piano mid-first-verse creating an equilibrium of heart centered instrumental sounds and floating thoughts of shimmer. The song feels like it expands like a slowly filling balloon that gets almost to the limit of popping via some electric guitar sounds at the end, but it never quite gets to an explosion.
“Andromeda”
The best song on the album arrives as a full release after much build up. Instead of singular noises, your ears are met with spacial synths that feel derived from a flying saucer that get smoothed by acoustic strums. When the hook arrives, the soundscape becomes the least rhythmic and most atmospheric thus far. That’s because the lyrics explore a spin out that gets calmed by a perspective on patience. Beatty signs with the faith that things will realign themselves. The end of the song releases out of the final hook into an instrumental solo build that sounds like the sun peeking through the clouds in the middle of rainfall.
“Bright Red”
Here, Gruska and Beatty return a bit to the old tape feel of the intro, which also feels like the morning after the spin out. It sounds like morning fog appearing outside the window while you’re sipping a cup of strong coffee. Then, as the song moves, some flute-like sounds poke through in a way like never before on the album yet. The calm becomes more complicated.
“Hunter”
This is the strangest song on the album and seems to mark a serious contemplation by Beatty. There is no apparent regard for structure, but rather, it’s a poem with an instrumental background. Multiple guitars layer swirl within each other and the song sounds like a campfire in the evening. The sounds at the beginning contain a bit of brightness, but by the end seem to fully sneak into the night. The jazz drums that arrive around the 3:45 mark feel like the moon's reflection bouncing off a lake.
“White Teeth”
Another song that feels like morning comes next, but this time like a morning drive on the open highway which ends at a beautiful rural home for a family gathering. The strings re-enter on the hook regaining their same initial presence they had on “Bruises Off The Peach.” These two songs seem to be in conversation with each other everytime I listen and I still haven't figured out why.
“Multiple Endings”
The melancholy, which reappears here, feels more centered. It’s the clearest piano ballad of the album. It arrives as a slow build to the album’s conclusion and does a perfect job of letting Beatty’s croons take center stage. The added element of a horn, for the first time in the background, grounds this lingering track with the perfect level of guttural synergy.
“Little Faith”
We arrive on what feels like a front porch in the evening with a whiskey glass and intriguing conversation. The album doesn’t end, but continues even as it concludes. Guitar and piano take control and allow for deep breaths and layered swoons. Then, just as the true ending appears, a sweet organ lifts us away accompanied by soothing falsetto.
No playlist this week, listen to Calico