“Intimate Spaces” – With Ryan Beatty’s Concert, The Fine Line Music Café Proves Less Is More

When you think of a place that has hosted acts as mainstream as Alanis Morissette, Ben Harper, John Mayer, the Neville Brothers, and even Lady Gaga, you’d be forgiven for mentally summoning a space somewhere between Target Center and the Roman Colosseum…but you’d be wrong to do so.  

In 1987, when the Fine Line Music Café assumed its current incarnation within the hungry concrete heart of Minneapolis’s Warehouse District, seemingly anything could happen on the local music scene:  a scrappy little band called Soul Asylum was about to sign with a major record company, following in the high-heeled footsteps of Mill City’s answer to Mozart, that Uptown Nelson kid who was doing more for the advancement of purple than the Minnesota Vikings’ defensive line of the previous decade.  

The Fine Line was poised to play its part in the process.

Why a small venue would attract big name artists might at first be confounding—a primary rule of show business is, the fewer the admission-paying audience members, the smaller the payoff–but that very smallness contains a yang which, in small doses, outweighs its yin, according to any artist who can afford this most precious of luxuries.  Again and again, over the course of its decades-long existence, all of the hosted artists cite the same central attraction for performing in a venue whose maximum capacity is 650 souls:  intimacy—that is, the ability to interact with an audience in the most familiar way possible.  

One musician likely to thrive in such an environment is up-and-coming, Los Angeles-based singer-songwriter Ryan Beatty.  His entire career has, in its way, been an exercise in deepening intimacy.  In 2011, Ryan Beatty was just another cute kid with a cute voice and a cute pout posting cute covers of cute songs on Youtube.  These postings received millions and millions of hits, enough to attract the recording industry who judged young Master Beatty to be its next flash-in-the-pan.  This judgment led to the recording and releasing of a mild, bubble-gum-flavored-popcorn single, “Every Little Thing,” aimed at the Radio Disney crowd.  

The success of this single extended the length of Beatty’s professional pan flash, leading to the creation of Because of You, an EP (“Extended Play,” or half-album).  Rallying around this enterprise, the adults around the rising star portrayed the young discovery as a teen heart throb.  

Superficially, this success was the realization of a lifelong dream, but Beatty harbored a secret that roiled beneath the dream’s surface:  he was as gay as a spring lamb.  Because Beatty’s success rested, up to that point, upon the shoulders of a legion of shrilly, fickle, giggly teenage girls, each of whom wanted to take Ryan to prom where she might induce blushing by holding his hand and stuff, coming out of the closet was out of the question.   As he would describe to one reporter in 2018, “Back then, I didn’t feel like I could be myself in any way, and the times that I did and tried to have my own identity, I never felt that it was taken seriously.”

It might seem a little shocking that such crafted dishonesty would take place in the 21st Century (although, then again, it might not)…but Beatty’s management, thinking of short-term dollar signs, insisted and persisted.  

So, as the old joke goes, Ryan Beatty got new management.

There was nothing funny about this process, though, as his management, along with his first record label, were not prepared to let the kid go.  Month after month after month of music-blocking litigation ensued, and Beatty’s childhood dream of being a professional musician seemed destined to end with his childhood.  

In 2016, Beatty emerged from this time-chewing travail reborn and remade and ready to be his true self.  He (finally) came out as gay and completed his first full-length album, Boy in Jeans.  Despite its juvenile title, that LP (or “Long Play,” a full album) revealed Ryan Beatty as a full-fledged artist, advocate…and adult, an adult no longer expressing himself superficially, but with a deep, fresh sense of integrity, independence…and intimacy.  

All three “i’s” are on full display in Beatty’s current album, Calico.  Indeed, all three “i’s” serve a fourth—introspection.  Calico unveils a storyteller whose mature perceptions of what happens on the inside affects how he views the outside.  Beatty understands, in a way even older artists might not, that being out is more than just being honest about one’s sexuality—being out, coming out is about letting the world see all of oneself, the parts one is proud of…annnd the other parts, too.  

All of this expression will come together on March 5, in Mill City’s Warehouse District, one song after another, forming a Fine Line of intimacy and creating a wholly new experience for anyone adventurous enough to try it.  As Ryan Beatty himself puts it in “Ribbons,” the first single from Calico: “…you’ve never known love like that, so you dance the night away!”

Ryan Beatty
First Avenue & 7th St Entry
701 N 1st Ave, Minneapolis
www.first-avenue.com/event/2024-03-ryan-beatty/