In the summer of 2014 TOTEM was a voice without a name. His songs reached small blogs one at a time, “Columbia” and “Rich Girl” among them, and when Wonky Sensitive wrote up a new one that August, it noted that he was not yet ready to say who he was. He was Anoop Desai, who had finished sixth on the eighth season of American Idol in 2009 and put out his first solo music the following year. By Yahoo Music’s later account, he then shut down his social media and returned as TOTEM, always photographed in shadow, with nothing in his bio about his real name or the show.
“Believe In Us” came out that summer as a standalone single, credited to TOTEM featuring Kinetics & One Love. The duo were Jeremy Dussolliet and Tim Sommers, who started writing together as students at Cornell, Dussolliet on the words and Sommers, a music major and classical percussionist, on the music. A song from their own first album found its way to Atlantic Records and became B.o.B’s “Airplanes”, with their chorus and music under his verses. It reached No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 2010, and the two had been writing and producing for other artists ever since.
One Love’s credit list names him as producer, co-writer and mixer of “Believe In Us”, and the upload ran a little over four minutes. Beyond that, the coverage documents almost nothing about the recording. Wonky Sensitive called it highly addictive, and moved on to TOTEM’s next song, “Chase Me”, produced by Adam LaRossa.
The anonymous run became a catalogue. In February 2015 TOTEM released Pride, a seven-song EP of his own, and it kept “Rich Girl” but not “Believe In Us”, which is not in the Apple Music catalogue either. Hype Machine lists the SoundCloud upload the blogs embedded as unavailable. “Bubblegum” (2016) and “Aftertaste” (2017) became his most-streamed songs, he played Lollapalooza in 2016, and since 2020 Desai has worked mainly as an actor, as the Djinn on What We Do in the Shadows among other roles. The song he made with the writers of “Airplanes” now survives as a row in One Love’s credits, dated to the summer TOTEM still kept his name to himself.
