“Lush,” due next month, is a 10-song reverie about building friendships, aspirations and love on shaky ground — the kind of uncertainty and hope that speckle adolescence with excitement but often calcify into fear and resignation with age. “The songs all had to have that moment for me where I feel like when I was playing live I could cry,” Ms. Jordan said, tucking into a late-afternoon breakfast burrito at her favorite diner, Sip & Bite, which has been featured on Guy Fieri’s “Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives.” “I’m comfortable being my whole imperfect self onstage and in songwriting,” she added. “Nothing is off limits.”

Ms. Jordan has been playing guitar for 13 years, making her the odd woman out in her nonmusical, but very supportive, family. Her mother, who shares Ms. Jordan’s fascination with fashion, owns a lingerie store called Bra-la-la; her father works for a company that provides textbooks and curriculum for home-school programs; and her older sister is an outdoorswoman. But the artists her mother listened to (Coldplay, the Fray, Lifehouse) and her sister favored (angsty, harder-edged Warped Tour bands) shaped Ms. Jordan’s earliest musical memories. Until she heard Paramore, she said, “I actually didn’t know women were allowed in bands.”

She asked for a guitar when she was 5 and started classical training, forcing herself to practice two hours a day. “It’s an obsessive personality trait,” she said. “My parents were never like, ‘Go practice.’ I was just like, ‘I have to practice.’” She brought a similarly fervent work ethic to ice hockey, which she played through high school.

When Ms. Jordan started attending a rock ’n’ roll camp, her passion became a competition, dulling her interest. “I was like, oh, now I have to learn ‘Cliffs of Dover,’” she said, referring to the Eric Johnson noodle-a-thon often heard in the aisles of Guitar Center. At 9, she began playing at sports bars in her parents’ friends’ cover band, the Eight Balls. Around 11, her spark for the guitar returned in earnest, and she starting writing songs, emailing the owners of restaurants and coffee shops to book her own sets. Then she discovered the D.I.Y. punk scene and didn’t want to play coffee shops anymore.