Music has always come naturally to Allegra Hernandez, whose latest single is “In My Heart.” Photo: Duane Tinkey
Writer: Anthony Taylor
A page of sheet music is just 9 by 12 inches. A lot of art has been created within those confines, to be sure. But for Allegra Hernandez, that paper is just a field full of notes and possibilities. The margins disappear. A riff written at age 14 can circle back and become an anthem at 25 before shooting off toward infinity.
Born in Albany, New York, Hernandez (who uses they/them pronouns) was just 10 when their family moved to Des Moines. They started playing piano at 9 and picked up the guitar at 12. They were a bit of a late bloomer by child-prodigy standards, but that just makes the next few years more remarkable.
Music has always made sense to Hernandez. They’ve put in a massive amount of work, but they also just see music in a way most of us don’t. By the time they started at Urbandale High School, they were spending nearly every waking moment playing guitar — often, by their own admission, at the expense of relationships and scholastic performance. It was a hyperfixation, paired with natural talent.
By their senior year in 2016, Hernandez had applied to the McNally Smith College of Music in Minneapolis and received a scholarship. Minneapolis was where Hernandez got their first real taste of playing in a band, which they found intoxicating. Unfortunately, the college abruptly closed its doors the following year, leaving Hernandez and other students in the lurch. Hernandez applied to the Berklee College of Music in Boston, where they received another scholarship.
Returning to Des Moines and finishing their degree online through Berklee, Hernandez continued writing their own music in every spare moment, which eventually brought them back to a B-chord riff they’d first strummed out when they were 14. It was just a simple little staccato spark of an idea, but when the pages in your head don’t have any margins or edges, there’s a lot of space for the sparks to catch. And for Hernandez, this particular spark set fire to the opening hook in an anthemic, pop-punk-tinged banger called “Use My Fkn Pronouns.”
While the opening may have marinated for a decade, Hernandez wrote the rest in about 24 hours. Poppy and frenetic, the song hammers home their underlying frustration of existing outside of heteronormative expectations: “How many times does it take for you to address me in the right way? / It’s just as important as my name.”
“The song is not trying to speak for anyone but myself,” Hernandez said. “But it’s really about understanding and seeing people how they see themselves.”
Hernandez recorded the song with bandmates Aaron Larimer and Vimka Nochvay and released it as a single with a music video in November 2022. And while it racked up respectable online numbers for a local debut, it was noteworthy for the outsized amount of hate detractors immediately posted about its message.
“It was November,” Hernandez recalled. “I’m getting these messages and threats on Thanksgiving, and I just couldn’t believe that this was how people were choosing to spend their holiday.”
Hernandez received threats of violence. People posted Hernandez’s work address, which eventually led Hernandez to lock down their social media accounts in an effort to give the trolls less information to weaponize.
“It really sucks when it’s your first major release and that happens to you,” Hernandez said. “It’s one thing if you release something and it doesn’t get a lot of traction. But if you release something, put your heart into it and get back … ” Their voice trailed off. “It really discouraged me for a little bit.”
Pressing on through life’s everyday discouragements can be difficult. Throw in cyberstalking and threats of violence, and nobody would blame someone for closing up shop and getting a job at Guitar Center. But Hernandez refused to go so quietly.
In a defiant article written for Iowa Public Radio’s Studio One titled “I Will Keep Singing ‘Use My Fkn Pronouns’ and Here’s Why,” Hernandez called out the comments and the threats. They reflected on how much power something as simple as a song can have over an insecure psyche. And they vowed to never let hate and intolerance have such power over them.
“One thing is certain though: I am not defined by these negative experiences in my life,” Hernandez wrote. “I am defined by how I carry myself through the world, how I can positively impact others and how I choose to represent myself in an authentic way.”
That upbeat, authentic voice continued to follow the endless paths of music in Hernandez’s head, and in June they released the music video to their most recent single, “In My Heart.”
“I really feel super proud of that song,” they said. “I wanted it to be an uplifting song. It’s really easy to find inspiration to write songs out of frustration and sadness. But ‘In My Heart’ was really written from a place of positivity.”
That uplifting spirit and drive for inspiration permeate everything Hernandez does, including their current work with Girls Rock! Des Moines. Since 2017, Hernandez has helped lead the band program in various capacities, and in 2024, they stepped up with Taylor Raibikis and Izzy Marx as co-directors to lead the organization’s future growth. That includes community instrument rentals, music lessons and a music production studio that Hernandez hopes to develop into a fully realized, nonprofit record label.
“We’ve grown into a year-round sustainable organization,” Hernandez said. “We don’t just do summer camps, we don’t just do rock music and we don’t just serve girls.”
It’s heady stuff, and it feels light years away from where the Girls Rock! program started. But that’s the distance you can cover — the kind of change you can create — when you take away the margins and life becomes a field full of notes, stretching toward infinity.
