After nearly a decade of dropping encyclopedic knowledge of cyberspace and its tendrils over beats injected with YouTube and video game samples, Devin Bailey is swapping out the hard drive of their rap career. The Boston-based artist—formerly known as Pink Navel—is formally rebranding as Dot Dev today with the release of their debut project under the new moniker, There Was a Wind, but No Chime. An eclectic blend of early Pink Navel demos and post-Navel compositions, the release marks a new direction for Bailey’s writing style.
The rapper is looking to move off of the quickfire online references that punctuated their time as Pink Navel, and instead take a decidedly more autobiographical tilt to their stylings. Odes to vlogging pioneer Ze Frank and the traveling salesman Beedle from Legend of Zelda make way for Dev-centric tales, exploring how bike-riding changed their life on “Places I Rode” and spitting about their thoughts on mortality through allegorical references to “the hyperlink that kills you” on a track of the same name. Underscoring this decidedly more personal approach are the samples of musical theater tracks scattered across the record, all sung by Bailey’s partner, Adrienne.
Dot Dev is still decidedly informed by the hobbies that had them dubbed “the world’s most online rapper” by SPIN in 2021. Catching up with Bailey a few weeks out from the release, they take note of the bridging done between their pop-culture-laden work as Pink Navel and the new turn as Dot Dev. “I’m not just going to put in an audio from, like, Adventure Time that makes no sense,” they explain. “On this record, all of the samples are really intentional.”
We chatted about this intentionality and more, including the origin story of the new Dot Dev moniker and their great love of bike riding. Check out our conversation and stream There Was a Wind, but No Chime below.
How are you feeling with the new project? This is kind of huge, right?
I feel like it’s big, too, but I’m not trying to be paying so much attention to how it’s being perceived—if people are excited, if they care, anymore. So much has changed for me in this space of doing indie music. It’s not the only basket that I have chips in anymore, so I’m finding a lot of pleasure in just enjoying the ride a little more than I did when I was younger. I remember making [2020’s] Giraffe Track and feeling like I need this record to do good or I’m gonna freak out. I don’t feel that way—I feel the most connected to the work and the music that I ever have, but at the same time, I feel the least connected to the “industry.” I’m working with a great label that’s taking care of a lot of the stuff I would usually do myself, and that’s really cool. Also, I just feel like I’m in the game for different reasons this time around, which is refreshing.
Would you want to expound on those reasons a bit, just in terms of how you’re approaching this project?
I think I’ve found a healthy balance, because I’ll always see myself as an artist. Making music is always gonna be a part of my life. But now I have professional aspirations, and I have goals outside of music. I want to open a sandwich restaurant, and I’m putting a lot of effort and time into that. And then also I have a job that I really, really love. I’m interested in beer and I’m interested in the chemistry of beer production. I guess my life is a little more rich and a little more branched in terms of what I’m interested in and what I’m pursuing.
In that way, when I carve out time in my life to make music or pursue music professionally, it feels a lot less high-stakes—even though I still take it seriously. I’m looking for press and I’m looking to join a booking agency. But I think I’m able to enjoy it a lot more because I have my feet in these other ponds. I don’t feel in danger if people don’t like my Instagram posts. All that superfluous stuff doesn’t really affect me as much as it used to. That’s the biggest difference between what I’m about right now versus how I moved as Pink Navel.
I’m curious about your move to the Dot Dev moniker. Did you use Dot Dev as “.dev” previously making music? Or has that always just been an online thing?
You know how rappers have a bunch of names? I feel like .dev was one of those names for me in the early side of the Pink Navel era. The original concept of the first record was all about how I felt so outside of my own identity and disillusioned about what it meant to be me—what it meant to be human—that I think I’d rather just be a computer file. It was all technological: .dev like .jpg or .png—that was the sort of running theme there. Then all of the songs were .dev files, so all the titles had “.dev” at the end. After a while, I think I just started using it as a name to refer to myself in verse or just for fun.
The decision to move away from Pink Navel, stylistically is that it’s not really pop-culture-focused at all. I think anyone who’s even a little familiar with my music is confident that I’ve said all the names that you can say. Even the name “Pink Navel” is like a pop culture reference. So I think what I want to do is move away from referential, unreal, fictional stuff and move into a little more of an autobiographical space. A little more straightforward and a little more transparent in terms of what I’m really talking about. I think that starts with being more true to the me that I am in real life, which is Dev. I think it also just pays homage to the lineage and it keeps things tied together. But it’s not a tight knot, you know?
I love what you did with the composition of “My Favorite” on the album versus the guitar-strummed version that you put up on socials. How do you approach that creation process?
I’ve been doing this thing lately where I write guitar songs and I actually feel like they need to be rap songs. It’s not really a rap song, it’s like a pop song, I guess. But making that beat, I needed it to be a little natural, a little stripped-down. I found these piano chords from somewhere and chopped them up, then I had this really nice drum part that was off one of my favorite records by this band called Jodi. I just really enjoyed the juxtaposition between those acoustic drums. And then I added 808 drums that are super hi-fi in the background.
I guess my approach was to make something that felt like it could exist in whatever world that this album is creating. I don’t want to say it completely switches genres or completely switches languages, but I think it adds a dimension of tone. That was my goal, I think, for the whole record, but especially for “My Favorite”: I wanted to make a song that really made the listener understand that this is something different, especially with those two really old songs. I think a lot of the songs I could’ve put out as Pink Navel, but “My Favorite” is a song that would’ve come from complete left field.
With this move toward the autobiographical, I wanted to invite you to talk about bike riding. “Places I Rode” is, to me, Dot Dev in essence.
I truly think that cycling has saved my life. Something happened to me last year that made me feel like I was never going to make music again. It didn’t just happen to me, but it happened to a lot of people and was really fucked up, and I truly was like, “I’m never going to make music, ever again. I’m just done. I don’t even want to think about it.” I have friends that are into cycling and just one day I was like, “I want that.” I bought a bike from my friend Max for not a lot of money, and I just started riding, like almost every day.
Growing up, I was not a very physically active person, so a lot of it was very new to me and it made me go into conversation with my body in a much different way, because it’s demanding. I remember the first time I rode, I rode maybe five miles and it kicked my ass. I was sore, but it felt amazing, and so I just kept riding and really enjoying it. And then you start getting into the gear. I think it’s actually interesting how that parallels with music, where there’s cool pieces of drum machine gear and there’s cool kinds of bike gear. I love stuff like that, so it was easy for me to become a little obsessed with the trends and watching videos about that kind of stuff. Eventually I bought my second bike, which is now my main bike. It’s a 1992 Specialized Stumpjumper, which is like an old mountain bike that I’ve put a lot of money and work into to make it this kind of all-terrain bicycle. Every weekend I do a big ride. I did my first half-century a couple of months ago, which is like 50 miles in a day. Every day I just surprise myself more and more.
I think one of the reasons why it saved me was because music has always been this thing that’s my hobby, but in some way, even if it’s not a lot, I do kind of wish it was my job. The dream is to get to make music and be paid for it and pay rent and hang out. But cycling is a hobby that I feel deeply connected to. It makes me feel very mindful. It makes me get outside. It really changed my perspective on where I live and my world. But there’s pretty much no way I could ever capitalize on the fact that I’m into cycling, and I think that really is amazing. It’s just a thing that I like that I love to share, and there’s nothing else about it.
