No. 133 - Radiohead’s “Let Down” changed my life

Actively discouraged by adults in her life, Angela Simione grew wings anyway

Mar 20, 2026

This Song Changed My Life is an independent music publication featuring weekly essays from people all around the world about the songs that mean the most to them. Created (and illustrated) by Grace Lilly.

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• 5 min read •

Brown couch. Yellow afternoon. Messy hair. Headphones. Discman spinning on my lap. I’d wanted one for months. Finally, a nice enough paycheck from laying down pepperonis at Pizza Hut to allow me this privacy, this volume.

I had to listen to music quietly when Dave was home. The angry voice on the other side of the bedroom door said so. I missed being able to curl up inside of a song the way I used to before this man came along and set up dominion under my mother’s roof. Gone were the long, sweet evenings at home alone with my sister while our mother was at work, huddled around the boombox on the living room floor, each of us with an ear pressed to the speaker, singing. He was always there now. And he had a lot of rules.

A brand new copy of Radiohead’s OK Computer swirled behind the window in the cover of the Discman. Songs I’d never heard before, one after another, and my thumb ever-inching the little black wheel of the volume up, up, up. I sat in the yellow light of a southern California afternoon in autumn with eyes closed, trying to forget where I was. The reality of things. How hard it had been. How mean and how lonely. Lonely as a tinkling electric guitar, melancholic and tender. The sudden build of a bassline pulsing quick and hard as my forever-anxious heart. Swirling, insistent, pleading lyrics. A voice cut loose and soaring, freer than mine had ever been, stepping off the ledge of heartache into an impossible hope.

Shell smashed, juicing flowing. My breath quickened and became irregular. My shoulders shook. I couldn’t control them. Wings twitch, legs are going. Eyes flickering behind their tight lids, rushing with tears, bolted shut against the view of that depressing all-brown living room. I’d never felt at home here. Not under this roof and not in this town. Let down and hanging around. Then, the memory of a different yellow afternoon the year before. My stepfather and I alone on the back porch.

“If I had a signed guarantee from God that, not only would you graduate, but that you’d graduate at the top of your class, and that you’d not only pay back the student loan but go on to become a world-famous artist, I still wouldn’t cosign a loan for you to go to art school.”

I was 17 years old.

The first time I met Dave, he yelled at me. He yelled at me for being on the phone when he’d come to pick my mother up for their very first date. Horrified, I watched my mother breeze out the front door on his arm. Soon, he was under our roof and the yelling never stopped. He called me names and made sure I knew how much he didn’t like me. Dave would keep time of our showers. He banged on doors and barked orders. He measured out how much milk we could drink. He chose what glass we could drink it from. He grounded me for two weeks for forgetting to turn off the fan in my bedroom before leaving for school one morning, “It could’ve thrown a spark and burned the whole house down.”

Dave grounded me for two weeks for pretty much anything. Ten minutes late coming home from school and I would be grounded. During those two weeks, he made sure life was as miserable as possible and that I knew how worthless and unwanted I was. He read my diary and mockingly quoted it to me. He told me that until I turned 18, I was his property and that anything that came from me was his property, too. My mother never commented negatively upon any of this, nor put a stop to it. She shrugged. She defended him. Crushed like a bug in the ground.

I started ditching school. Eventually, I ran away from home. Twice. I remember the last cop who came to our front door to ensure I was really back home before lifting the Missing Persons Report saying to my angry stepfather, “Kids don’t run away for no reason. Especially not girls.”

That yellow afternoon on the couch, as the lyrics rushed into my ears, volume high, my eyes flooding with tears, I felt my mind change. The refrain that had been playing in my brain on loop for years of I-CAN’T-GO-ON-LIVING-HERE became I-WILL-NOT-DIE-IN-THIS-TOWN. One day, I am gonna grow wings.

For the next seven years, I spent as much time as I could inside the art department at the community college in my hometown, holding tight the knowledge contained in that single lyric; the knowledge that other people managed to build lives that fit them, lives that didn’t make them want to run away.

I kept my job at Pizza Hut and worked as a maid, then as a cocktail waitress in a strip club, before landing a job at an art supply store. There wasn’t much talk of college at home, nor any encouragement to go. I paid for my books and tuition on my own. I took painting classes at night and held that song in my head as I moved the oil paint I’d pocketed from work across cheap canvas, repeating that solitary, pleading lyric against the reality I was stuck in. One day, I am gonna grow wings.

I took every art class available, repeating them as many times as I could until I was barred from enrolling again, begging special permission from the department head to make an allowance for me just one more time. One day, I am gonna grow wings.

On September 3^rd, 2005 at 9 a.m., the morning of my 25^th birthday, I walked into my first class at California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland, CA. I sat down at a drawing horse, no longer in need of anyone’s signature other than my own. One day. Where you are. Where you are. Where you are. ◆