John Wells is a Baltimore rapper whose music is built from the people, places, and experiences that have stayed with him. His story starts in Baltimore, around Echodale off Belair Road, but he was largely raised out in Essex and Middle River. To him, the distance between those places never felt especially far. The county, as he describes it, was still close enough to Baltimore to absorb the same tension, the same violence, and the same way of moving through the world.
In 2013, those early instincts had become songs, and Wells began releasing music.. This year, he released “F*CK the ALGORITHM*,” his fifth full-length album and the follow-up to the critically acclaimed EPs “I don’t wanna die” parts 1 and 2. Over the course of these albums, Wells has developed a body of work that moves through grief, family, friendship, neighborhood life, and his place as an independent artist trying to keep control of his music, and writes more openly now about the people he wants to protect, the future he wants to build, and the ways the past continues to shape both. As his sound has settled, Wells has become more inward, with memories, relationships, and the consequences of loss taking up more space than they did in his earlier work. He has also drifted away from the need to show every version of what he can do as a rapper, letting individual songs stay with one feeling or moment long enough for the details to carry them.
But even before he was John Wells the rapper, he was already creating.
As a kid he started messing around with guitars in the house and writing stories on the computer. “I printed a whole book using the clip art that used to be on Microsoft Word,” he says.
Music was already close enough for Wells to reach for. He remembers his father as a gifted singer, and an uncle who played in a band and kept instruments around the house. In elementary school, Wells tried putting together a band of his own. He had an electric guitar, learned enough of “Smoke on the Water” to play around with it, and figured out how to turn up the distortion until picking a single high string sounded like a solo. He never became much of a guitarist, he says, but he was already finding ways to make something out of whatever was around him.
This is the kind of small, homemade detail that makes his path into rap feel less like a turn and more like a natural progression.
During our conversation, Wells carries a focused stillness, giving each question his full attention and pausing when he wants to pull a memory into clearer view. He talks the way he raps: thoughtful, plainspoken, and without much interest in dressing things up for effect. That seriousness shows up most clearly in the work Wells puts into his writing. He is deliberate about sharpening his lyricism, changing the way he approaches rhyme and continuing to experiment rather than settling into a sound simply because it is recognizable as Baltimore rap. For Wells, standing apart does not mean separating himself from the city that shaped him. It means resisting the pressure to become a familiar version of a Baltimore rapper, pushing his technique and perspective until the music sounds distinctly like his own.
“I take everything seriously,” he says.
Wells has a broad face framed by a full reddish beard, with a closely-trimmed mustache blending into the hair along his jaw. He has a fair complexion, clear-framed glasses and a solid, broad build. While he raps, Wells keeps a steady nod with the beat, his gestures giving shape to the memories he is rapping about and shifting with the lyrics, emphasizing certain words as the memories unfold. At one point, he hooks his thumb over his shoulder, pointing behind him as he reaches into the past, as if the people, places, and moments he is describing are still somewhere just behind him. His focus remains steady as he moves through the details: the violence he witnessed growing closer to his circle, the music that showed him he could take a different path, and the decision he made at 11 years old to become a rapper.
By the time he was 15, Wells’ focus had a setup behind it. His mother bought him a little USB mic from Best Buy, and he started recording at home. Later, rapper Scotty Banx became the first friend to push him forward, not just with encouragement but with infrastructure. Banx went on to record Wells’ first mixtape for free, helped him start Beam House Records, and drove him to shows and early radio interviews while they were still teenagers. He believed in him hard enough to say, “I’ll bet the house on John Wells.”
Much of Wells’ work has been centered on the losses that he has experienced. He describes his father’s death through the bluntness of the COVID years: a quick flight to Florida, strict hospital rules, and doctors telling his father, right in front of him, that he was going to die. The memory still sits close when Wells tells it. Losing his father left him with a sharper sense of how little time people can have with one another.
On “What Am I Running From,” Wells turns the pressure he carries into one of the clearest images on “I don’t wanna die (Pt. 2).” He is trying to build safety for the people around him while knowing he cannot completely shield himself from what is coming. “Trying to build a fortress that’d keep my people safe from harm / were they headed for me all because I know he wanted better for me,” he raps.
Anchored by the production and turntablism of DJ-SUN, “F*CK the ALGORITHM*” continues to address family damage, neighborhood memory, homeboys in the street, people on drugs, and all the things Wells names as part of the world he knows. “We just let our dead homeboys tell stories for us,” he tells me.
Wells is still writing about what surrounds him, but now he is also wrestling with what it means to make music, put it into the world, and maintain control over how people access it. He released both live and studio versions of “F*CK the ALGORITHM,” extending its range beyond a single presentation of the songs and bringing in artists including Quelle Chris from Detroit, Michigan, who is featured on “95 north,” adding another distinct voice without pulling the record away from Wells’ world.
As his career moves forward, Wells still has large ambitions for where rap can take him. He wants a Grammy and wants to be remembered as “one of the greatest rappers ever,” but the future he describes is not built around fame alone. He wants music to give him enough stability to take care of the people around him and the generations that come after him. He keeps returning to the people and places that shaped him, including the ones he has lost along the way. Wells writes from the position of someone who understands that getting further in life does not automatically put distance between you and what hurt you. For Wells, the point is not to outrun any of it. It is to keep going while knowing some things will always come with him.
“You are chasing those good feelings to hopefully let it outweigh the pain,” he says.