Sertanejo, Brazil’s twangy, stadium-sized country music, is a national juggernaut. It ruled the country’s streaming charts for seven straight years, and even in 2025, after pagode finally nudged it out of the top spot, the most-streamed act in Brazil was still a sertanejo duo, Henrique & Juliano. It’s the sound of Brazil’s agribusiness heartland—cowboy hats, pickup trucks, God, sofrência (the genre’s signature wallowing in heartbreak), and a machismo so ingrained it usually goes unspoken. Sertanejo isn’t a genre built to make room for someone like Reddy: a trans woman, a former drag artist, a singer who learned the music in her family’s household long before she had the language to express who she really was. And here she is anyway, releasing a new live EP Ao Vivo, Vol. 1, turning up at rodeios, and thriving in rooms that were never designed for her.
“I’ve been a sertaneja singer since birth. I was born singing sertanejo,” Reddy tells Remezcla over video. She has been releasing music for years, well before the public knew her as a trans woman, performing under the stage name Reddy Allor. These days, she goes simply by Reddy, having dropped the surname and traded her name’s old English-style pronunciation for a Brazilian one. “I really want to make my path my own now,” she says. About two years ago, she came out as a trans woman—the name adjustment was part of that same redefinition. April’s Ao Vivo, Vol. 1 is her first work released since coming into her own.
Reddy grew up in a small town in the interior of São Paulo, singing with her brother since she was 12. “It was always natural. Sertanejo was my family’s music; I grew up inside it,” she says. “I just wanted to sing.” Trouble began when she wanted to wear makeup. Her defense was simple: “I’m an artist,” she shares. It didn’t matter. She was restricted by her parents. No makeup. Not those words. Not that outfit. “In a town that small, it felt like everyone knew everyone, and everyone was talking,” she adds. By 18, feeling suffocated, she came out as trans to her family. “I already knew who I was, but I still couldn’t show it,” she explains.
What Reddy found instead was drag. She’d always loved transformation, the circus, painting, and costumes. Putting on a wig allowed her to stop holding herself back. The first time she got into drag and looked in the mirror, she recognized herself. “It was magical, a reunion with myself,” she says. “This is me. Reddy was never a character or an alter ego. She’s me. She was always me.” For someone who’d spent years hating her own reflection, it was the first time she liked what she saw.
The wig, however, eventually turned on her. “Drag started to become toxic for me, because the second I took off the wig and the makeup, it was as if I stopped existing,” she says. “I’d only exist again once I was back in drag.” Her gender transition, she explains, has been the opposite of drag. “Now I’m a woman with my own hair, a woman without so many shields,” she declares. “Drag had become a shield for my whole life.”
Reddy could’ve crossed into pop music, where queer artists have an easier experience in comparison, and for a while, she almost did it. The LGBTQ+ crowd kept asking for it, and part of her believed sertanejo would never accept her anyway. Then her transition, she jokes, “punched me twice and said: ‘Let’s actually get to know each other at 27.’” Underneath, she found the same kid who’d dreamed of riding a horse into a rodeo, acclaimed as a sertaneja diva. “I’m a sertaneja singer. My dreams were shaped that way since I was a child,” she says.
Permission to stay came from another woman: Marília Mendonça. Reddy watched the late star and the feminejo wave, women muscling to the front of a male-dominated genre, push women’s real stories into songs that had always been sung from the man’s side. “Before that, it was all implicit. Nobody talked about women’s experiences,” she says. “Even as a man back then, I never identified with that universe.” Mendonça showed her she could keep singing sertanejo and still be herself. When Reddy put out her first single “Tira o Olho,” Mendonça shared the video on her socials and wrote that she loved discovering a drag artist in sertanejo. “That was the moment. I thought, ‘This is my path,’” she notes.
But existing in sertanejo is a daily negotiation. Reddy calls the barrier “raízes sociais,” or social roots: the sense that she has to prove herself before she’s allowed in anywhere. The exclusion is rarely loud. “It’s one thing to walk into a place and be welcomed, and another to walk in and feel people sizing you up and pulling away, and then you pull away too,” she says. “It becomes a space that’s inaccessible from both sides.” For years, she stayed in a bubble where she felt safe, until she realized the bubble had carried her away from her own ambitions. But after a lot of therapy, she’s been making herself do the opposite: show up at the rodeio, in sertanejo rooms, and explain herself patiently until people get that she’s just a person. “If both sides stay closed, nothing happens. Someone has to move,” she explains.
Reddy is very aware of what her presence does. She’s the first drag artist and one of the few trans women in sertanejo, clearing a previously uncharted path. Is that frightening or hopeful? “It’s everything,” she answers. She knows it matters. “People write me, ‘I used to hate sertanejo. Then I heard you and realized I didn’t hate the music. I hated not feeling represented in it,’” she shares. The fear is real, too. “No one like me has made it yet.” But she’s built her whole life on that exact dare. “You can’t wear makeup? Then I’ll wear a ton of makeup. You can’t wear that? Then I’ll dress as feminine as I possibly can,” Reddy says.
Ao Vivo, Vol. 1 is an audiovisual live album of re-recorded hits, plus a new single called “Beba.” It’s also where all of this lands. Now, she lets herself be human now; not every take has to be perfect. The song she points to as the one that holds this moment is “Sozinha.” “Even with people beside me, this is a process only I can live inside my own head,” she says. It’s sofrência at its purest, the kind you sing through tears even when you’re not crying. “But I am suffering, too.”
What she wants from sertanejo in the end is almost modest, and it has nothing to do with being an artist. “I just want to be a normal person,” she says. “I’m a singer like any other in that room, wanting my space, my recognition, to earn my living. People put so many other things in front of that. Prejudice, lack of information. That’s what created the distance. ‘You haven’t even talked to me. You don’t know what I have to say,’” she says.
When asked what she’d tell the 12-year-old who used to sing sertanejo with her brother, Reddy pauses. She’d tell her to keep going, she says, not to be afraid. That, however impossible it all looks from there, things work out, and she gets to be exactly who she wants.
For years, she judged that girl, and herself, as something horrible, a monster, stupid. She doesn’t anymore. “Now I can look at myself and at my own story with more tenderness, and more pride,” she says. The kid, she’s sure, would be proud too.
Ao Vivo, Vol. 1 is out now.