Bounding through the doorway comes Betty. She’s large with long black fur, grey marks around her eyes from old age, and the demeanor and double coat of a Belgian shepherd crossed with a border collie. Hollywell follows suit with a big grin and outstretched arms, a DIY king ready to show off his castle, while an unreleased Twisted Teens song with Winkler singing harmonies blasts throughout the room. “Nina! Welcome to Teens town!” he nearly shouts. “Want a tour?”
Hollywell operates his home like a punk house, where anyone is welcome to crash for as long as they need. In the front room, which doubles as a recording studio, every surface is covered in personal items: framed photos and loose polaroids, a cross-stitched monkey dressed as Peter Pan, multiple decks of playing cards, a pink parasol, neon green dice, the original tin-type photo on the cover of 2024’s Twisted Teens. It’s just an illusion of clutter, though, as everything is shelved or hung up and the floors are spotless. A cordless Dyson vacuum rests on a wall.
There’s a guest bedroom with a massive wooden bunk bed built by a competitive bass fisherman who starred in an MMA reality TV show. Next door is Hollywell’s bedroom, where natural light floods the walls covered in retro ephemera—a faux political sign for Cyndi Lauper, a diagram of the cockatiel’s embryonic development—and so many paperback books that I lose track counting.
He pushes open a screen door, and we spill into a sprawling backyard that is half junkyard and half magical imaginarium. A green trailer sits to the side of the property (where RJ “Razor” Santos, Twisted Teens’ console steel player, first lived when he moved to New Orleans), a ‘90s sewer camera truck converted into a modest home (where Mel Billiard, Twisted Teens’ secret weapon of a guitarist, currently lives), a camper van (where two of Caspian’s Gen X friends, a carpenter and a so-called witch, temporarily reside), a classic yellow school bus (as seen on the cover of their February album Blame the Clown), a standalone wooden patio (with a functioning fridge and radio), an open-air shed (stocking eight bikes, among other items), and another patchworked shack that my brain can’t compute as also residing on this property. A handful of chickens and roosters roam the property. They showed up several years ago, as if they somehow intuited its vibe.
Daniel D`Amico for SANREMO.FM
