Mike Milosh on 17 hours at the wheel in Iceland, the soy allergy behind the best meal he ever had in Japan, and why the world is smaller than the news suggests.
Mike Milosh does not like planes. “If I can drive it, I will!” says the singer behind Rhye. “I don’t really love being in planes. I would gladly drive anything from 7 to 8 hours versus fly.”
Most of the time on tour he drove the band’s Sprinter van himself, until he hired a tour manager, and in Iceland he once drove for 17 hours straight, taking whatever routes he liked. Somewhere along the way, they came across volcanoes. “I love that kind of adventure where it’s not highly scripted,” he says. “It’s really about discovery.”
His habit of finding his own way goes back to a train station in Paris. At 18 he spent three months backpacking around Europe, and a strike left him stranded. “I remember being on a train station in Paris during a train strike, and not getting help and having to figure things out for myself,” he says. “At that moment I realized that ‘wow, I’m really on my own.’ So there’s a lot of personal development from travelling and in those moments you kind of gotta just suck it up and work through it.”
He has been moving ever since. He has lived in Holland, Thailand, Germany, Los Angeles, Montreal and Toronto. In 2010, after playing a single show in Berlin, he found a cheap apartment there and left Montreal, knowing almost no one. “I love dropping into a city without knowing anyone because it really forces you to be social and not be complacent,” he says. “Because you will be really lonely so it’s nice to go out and talk to people.”
Rhye has turned that restlessness into a job. On tour he tries to build in a few days at the end to explore, or to arrive early. Before a couple of shows in Japan, he went a week ahead and found a fishing town with hot springs where nobody spoke English. “It was a very humbling experience,” he says.
Japan taught him something else. “I’m allergic to soy so when I’m in Asia I have to really figure out what to do,” he says. Some places don’t take the allergy seriously, so he ends up eating Italian and Mexican food, which led to a surprise. “The best meal I’ve ever had in Japan was Mexican food.” He has a theory about why. “Japanese people have a deep appreciation for other cultures and they try to find ways to honour it. So when they do something like Mexican food they really honour it and do it right.”
Some trips are about the culture more than the scenery. In Taipei, he and his girlfriend went looking for old teahouses. “My girlfriend and I sought out really old tea houses and we got to experience traditional Taiwanese tea ceremonies,” he says. Iceland, by contrast, was barren and all about the landscape. “So Iceland was more a photographic trip for me while Taiwan was more memories versus photographic evidence of a trip.”
Some of what he finds on the road is harder to explain. He once met someone who told him his future. “I met one person that kind of prophesied that I was going to be an artist and travel the world,” he says. “That was a very mystical experience and you know just little things like that stick with you.”
All that movement has left him an optimist. “One big thing that I think is really important is that people are less different than we think,” he says. The divisions on the news, he has found, look smaller on the ground. “They want to be happy, they want to fall in love, they want to have kids, they want to have nice experiences, they want to enjoy the day, you know?”
For all his moving around, he knows where he would end up. Asked where he would live if it weren’t Los Angeles, he picks Canada, and then Toronto. “I love both cities but I think it would be Toronto because my parents are there,” he says. “Being closer to my parents especially as they get older is something really important to me.”
Words by Mo Topping & Braeden Alexander. Photography by Emma Marie Jenkinson.
