"The sweet riff in Hot For Teacher" has always been and will remain Eddie Nilssen's answer as to why he picked up a guitar at the ripe age of seven. Growing up an only child in Coldwater, Michigan to a middle class, average family proved to be fairly boring. His mother Sharon, a substitute teacher and frequent volunteer at the local church, would often drag him along to the bake sales and fundraisers where Eddie would sneak away and keep himself busy with a pen or two, rattling out a beat against the wooden pew before being told to go amuse himself elsewhere. The polite, churchy way of saying "shove off" that Jesus himself would approve of.
Neither parents were all that musically inclined, but that didn't stop the young kid from his love of rock music and his determination to mimic the guitar greats he'd seen on his precious MTV. Eddie's dad, also an Edward, had an old acoustic guitar that sat in its case for years before his young son found it and claimed it as his own. Granted, it was half his size but eventually he grew into it and mastered every inappropriate Van Halen song you could think of, much to his mother's dismay.
At the age of thirteen, he was finally gifted his own set of drums that his parents quickly felt a deep sense of regret over. Luckily for them, he was more interested in learning that new Guns N' Roses song instead of girls. As Eddie aged, so did his musical tastes and he found himself veering away from hair metal (thank god, maybe puberty knocked some sense into him) and more toward folk and the blues.
Once he turned seventeen, he kissed Michigan goodbye and headed to Nashville, Tennessee. He lived there for a couple of years, playing at any open mic night while recording his first EP that debuted in 1999 at the age of 20. Two years later, his first studio album Room For Squares put him on the map as a romantic, soft rock songwriter. If only thirteen year old Eddie could see himself then, oh boy.
Early in his career, Nilssen went a little crazy with drinking and prescription pills occasionally to help him through long nights on tour, but none of it ever stuck with him. He quickly grew out of that "rock and roll" lifestyle phase and moved onto greener pastures. His real vice, which he'll admit freely, is women. And not in the sense that he's a lothario, a modern day Hugh Hefner (although he definitely plays that image up to the media for fun) but he craves romance and intimacy and that's probaly why you'll catch him using the term "sexual napalm" in interviews. He's only a little sorry.
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