Johnny Venus has spent years moving through music in company—beside WowGr8 in EARTHGANG, among the shape-shifting collective Spillage Village and within Dreamville’s expansive orbit—yet, while collaboration sharpened his instincts and widened his world, his debut solo album, The 11th Hour, required a different kind of discipline: the willingness to stand alone long enough to hear himself clearly.
“What matters most is the authenticity and the honesty behind what I’m saying,” Venus told Newsweek, explaining how personal resilience, self-acceptance and a deeper commitment to his craft opened space for the album’s candor. Although solitude gave those ideas room to breathe, he sees the work as part of a larger creative ecosystem, since every collaboration—whether with Angélique Kidjo, Tobe Nwigwe or Tiana Major9—offers another channel to learn, contribute and create.
Serving the Art
For Venus, the catalyst behind a prolific stretch—which has included visual storytelling, with the EARTHGANG: Wheel of Fate comics and a full solo statement—was neither strategy nor spectacle; it was devotion. “The recurring theme has been to serve the art,” he said, and, as he considered artists including Beyoncé, Nina Simone, Michael Jackson, Prince and D’Angelo, he returned to a conviction shaped by longevity: Artists who exceed every forecast usually dedicate themselves to the work before they calculate what the work can return.
“It’s a beautiful thing to be able to say, ‘This is what I’m experiencing in life, and I know I’m not the only one,’” Venus said, “so I’m going to find the most creative way to put this out in as many avenues and as many ways as possible.” Across music, cover art and visuals, experience becomes something measurable, while private feeling becomes a meeting place.
Unlearning the Script
Creating a solo album also forced Venus to examine inherited assumptions, because industry habits were only part of what needed dismantling, and childhood programming—ideas about manhood, partnership, love and artistic ambition—proved more difficult to name. “The programming is so subtle and so consistent,” he said. “This journey has been a journey of unlearning my programming—unlearning what people say I’m supposed to be, what people say I’m supposed to be aspiring to, how I should approach relationships or how I should approach my art in general.”
Lauryn Hill’s The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill became a touchstone because its emotional architecture honors confusion without disguising it, and Venus wanted to extend similar grace toward the parts of his own story he once may have hidden. On “Can You Pray for Me,” he confronted material demanding attention even when disclosure felt uncomfortable. “I don’t really want to get into this for real, for real,” he recalled thinking, “but I know it needs my attention, it needs my love, it needs my grace.” If the song could serve his healing while helping someone else recognize their own, exposure would have purpose.
Vulnerability Before the Beat
Honesty, however, cannot be summoned through a single technique, and Venus laughed at the possibility of reducing creative openness to a tidy answer. “If it were that easy, I’d have had this album done a year or two ago,” he said. The closest he came to a formula was “being open, staying open, remaining open,” even while deciding which parts of the self belong in public, which can survive commodification and which deserve privacy.
Those decisions became easier when trust preceded recording, because many breakthroughs happened beyond the studio, and the collaborators who could share difficult life conversations also understood how to protect the music once an instrument entered the room. “The vulnerability is there, human to human,” Venus said. “Then, when the beat starts or when somebody starts playing a riff on the guitar, it’s like, ‘Ah, we already done the heavy lifting.’”
Finding the Center With The-Dream
Executive producer The-Dream offered guidance through presence more often than pronouncement, and Venus absorbed lessons by watching a master songwriter decide when to intervene, when to redirect and when to leave a finished idea untouched. “It wasn’t like a sit-down, ‘Son, let me put you on game’ type of thing,” Venus said. “It was just being around, being in the energy and exchanging moments of learning and connecting.”
The lesson was confidence: pursue the idea, keep the art first and resist the impulse to chase a hit before locating an honest connection. Some songs needed no touch from The-Dream because the center was already visible; others required a precise nudge. “Come back to the center,” Venus remembered hearing. “Stay true to how you were moving.” Their Atlanta connection added another layer, since the partnership joined two artists who understood ambition without confusing authority for ego. “It was just genuine love, respect and commitment to serving the art,” Venus said.
The Sound of Truth
By early spring, after Venus had recorded “On & On & On,” “Swallowed Pride” and “Can You Pray for Me,” “Runway Killer” clarified the project’s sonic grammar, and he began revisiting earlier records, amplifying what belonged while muting what distracted. “The elements of my album, and even of my sound, [are] my voice, the guitar—or the bass guitar—and the drums,” he said. “When I have the right mix of all of those three, then I know: this is my sound.”
The emotional center proved simpler to define, although embodying it across 12 songs remained demanding. “The emotional connection is truth,” Venus said. “Anything I’m putting on this album, it has to be true first and foremost.” Coolness could not become the objective, and sonic ambition could not outrun experience; every record needed a moment in which a listener might hear an unvarnished piece of life and answer, “I get it.”
Why the Eleventh Hour Matters
The number 11 had long drawn Venus because he associates it with duality: two ones, intuition beside logic, imagination alongside foundation. “You have to learn how to master both of those energies,” he said, describing a lifelong negotiation between the audacity to envision EARTHGANG before he understood the music industry and the practical labor required to communicate, build and sustain the vision.
The title also carries urgency, because transition arrives whether a person prepares for it or not. “The 11th hour—it’s like overtime, bro,” Venus said. “It got to happen right now.” During the album’s creation, he felt “like a sword being forged in the fire,” as each day brought another lesson, another revision and another test of endurance; still, preparation meant learning to receive joy with the same awareness required to survive difficulty. “You got to be prepared to enjoy the good moments in life too,” he said. “You got to be prepared to be thankful and savor those moments.”
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A Fuller Portrait
Every song documents a breakthrough, Venus said, because the evolution began before the project had a name and continued while he traveled to Bali for yoga teacher training, returned home and spent the next two years integrating what he had learned. Some challenges were emotional, as on “Can You Pray for Me”; others were vocal or technical, as on “Nightmares” and “American Dream,” where blues, rock, country and trap converged into what he called “raw, ghetto Americana.” “These are the sounds my dad and my granddad and them made,” he said, and the production became a way to place inherited Southern music inside a contemporary meditation on love.
“Runway Killer,” meanwhile, asked Venus to look outward, and, as he wrote from another person’s perspective, he considered the moment when separate lives converge and demand a shared decision. The exercise enlarged the album’s range, while the solo format gave listeners more room to encounter his. “With EARTHGANG, you only get so much space because it’s a duo,” he said. “With this project, you get a chance to have a full, rich, lush palette of what I and my team are capable of creating.”
He hopes the fuller portrait makes celebrity feel less remote. “I just hope it humanizes me more,” Venus said. “I hope it humanizes them, and I hope it creates a huge multitude of people who feel seen and understood and represented.”
Building the World Beyond the Album
Venus already sees the next chapter expanding beyond sound, and time spent in Japan has strengthened his interest in creative worlds where fashion, photography, film and music reflect a unified intention. Having studied architecture and graphic design, he approaches visual storytelling like an extension of composition, because a record can tell listeners how a world sounds while an image reveals how it was inhabited.
“Visually representing the music is my next thing I really, really want to challenge myself with,” he said, citing the interconnected videos of Jungle and Bad Bunny alongside the theatrical scale of Kehlani’s live show. “It does the music so much justice to be able to say, ‘Yeah, this is what it sounds like, and this is the world I was living in while this was taking place.’”
For all the album’s discipline and spiritual searching, Venus’s final request was disarmingly simple. “Sit with it, have fun with it,” he said. He made the project concise enough to replay within an hour, and, after spending years translating pressure, love, loss and transformation into songs, he wants listeners to protect the life carrying them through each repeat. “Stay locked into your wellness,” Venus said. “Health is the real wealth.”
Newsweek’s reporters and editors used Martyn, our AI assistant, to produce this story. Learn more about Martyn here. Contact Newsweek editors on this story: Mark Muir, Edward T. Cummins