WELLS — If you’ve heard Eminem’s “Lose Yourself,” this scene may be familiar.

Joey Spinelli, who turns 20 this month and goes by the stage name J.Spin, was doing a show a couple months ago in Portland, when the other rap act invited him to an impromptu freestyle battle. There were about 150 people in the audience. The other guy began, said his verse, and then handed J.Spin the mic. He was nervous.

“I go for a minute straight, and literally after a minute I could start feeling puke come up from my stomach. … I say the last two words, throw the mic back to my friend, jump off the stage and puke into my hands in midair,” Spinelli said Thursday. He didn’t return to the show.

While he hasn’t performed since that show, Spinelli has been busy. Most recently he released a song with Maine’s biggest rapper and fellow Wells High School graduate Ryan Peters, better known as Spose. The song, “207,” will appear on an album he is planning to release later this year.

Spinelli has been writing rap since seventh grade. In those first few years, it was just “fooling around with songs” and experimenting – he didn’t really listen to much rap when he was younger. However, his musical roots are undeniable. His father is a pianist who plays locally at weddings and hotels, while his mother sings; his parents have even recorded an album together.

“When I was a freshman, I found out I had a knack for it and I love it,” Spinelli said. “I would write for five hours a night; I would be brain dead.”

He said he faced a lot of people who were confused or laughed at his aspirations in high school when he wrote through the lunch period, but his drive is what carried him through, and he released one album on SoundCloud about a year ago.

“I really didn’t care, but at the same time it was like, ‘I’m doin’ what I love, bro, why you hatin’?’” he said.

For Spinelli, the key to a good song is a good melody. He writes lyrics laced with wordplay, and his rapid-fire style ranges from tracks about falling out of touch to growing up. He works with a number of producers who send him beats over social media.

“I love melody, that’s what I mostly like to bring,” he said. “I want people to be able to vibe to my music.”

Currently, he’s listening to a lot of different artists, but the first ones on his mind were Chance the Rapper, Mac Miller and Kendrick Lamar, whose two latest albums were released to critical acclaim.

Spinelli has a construction job right now, which relegates his time to write music to the end of an exhausting day, but he’s been accepted to Full Sail University and plans to attend in the future, where he hopes to build the audio engineering skills that could launch a career as a producer.

The collaboration with Spose came about through Spose’s friend Shane Reis, who was a fan of J.Spin’s music, and Peters echoed Spinelli’s ear for melody.

“What I like about (J.Spin) is he’s got a lot of potential, a lot of room to grow, but what he has that a lot of kids don’t have is a knack for melody and a really, really unique voice,” Peters said in a voice message Thursday.

Spose is a bit of role model for Spinelli, showing you can have a career in Maine as a rapper. But Spinelli knows he needs to develop his own voice.

“What Spose did was smart. I can’t go into it and be like, ‘Maine, Maine, Maine’ … but Spose has always been that dude, where it’s like, he’s from Wells, look what he’s done, it’s not impossible. He showed me if you keep working, good things will happen.”

Spinelli’s album, “Young Spicoli,” named after the character from Fast Times at Ridgemont High, will be released on Christmas.