From the title alone, one might assume that Anna Yukevich’s new EP, The Good Ones, focuses solely on “the good stuff.” But that would be a mistake, as the Islander’s debut album — an infusion of indie folkpop with bossa nova and jazz — scales a vast emotional topography.

Over six tracks, Ms. Yukevich charts life’s proverbial peaks and valleys, from the rush of new romance by starlight to self-doubt, break-ups and even breaking a finger.

“Writing music is a way to process,” Ms. Yukevich said in a recent Zoom interview with the Gazette, from her current home in Albany, N.Y. “Not only the sadness, but the good stuff, too.”

Produced by Eamon Ford and written and recorded over the course of much of her adulthood, The Good Ones is a coming-of-age story shaped by the doo-wop, classical and jazz music she listened to as a child.

Ms. Yukevich, 32, was introduced to music at age three, when she started playing violin with Island music teacher Nancy Jephcote. She also nurtured a love of theatre by acting in productions at the Martha’s Vineyard Playhouse, located just three blocks away from her family’s home and where her father Dr. Gerry Yukevich often performed.

Anna Yukevich in 2011, performing in the regional high school production of Chess.

Ivy Ashe

Anna Yukevich in 2011, performing in the regional high school production of Chess.

Ivy Ashe

But it was picking up her mom’s guitar in fourth grade that started her journey with writing music. She would lie on her bed, her mom’s “giant” Gibson acoustic classical guitar on her stomach, plucking out chords to soothe herself on difficult nights.

“I have small hands and the fretboard is like that wide,” she recalled, gesturing to demonstrate.

Today, her songwriting process starts out in her iPhone’s notes app. She has it perpetually open while walking around the city, and when she’s ready to put her thoughts to music, she picks up her guitar.

A more vulnerable, immersive component also anchors the creative journey.

“It usually involves dating and getting heartbroken,” she said.

As a songwriter, Ms. Yukevich distills her experiences of love and heartbreak by mining them for singular moments: a third-date camping trip or a passing thought of adopting a boyfriend’s vegetarianism.

She has a penchant for playful lyrics, in one instance rhyming “s’mores” with “Mandy Moore.” But cheeky turns of phrase are just as quickly eclipsed by blunt revelations, like in her song Pulp Fiction, when she plainly states that “my mother told me I’d never suffer enough to make a masterpiece.”

Ms. Yukevich said music affords her the emotional agility to write honestly.

“It’s so much harder to express myself without music or without poetry,” she said.

Occasionally, she excavates emotional truths by moving away from facts. On Hope Is at the Bottom of My Suitcase, she offers a fictional account of a failed but optimistic attempt to seduce a boyfriend with cheap lingerie. As the final track, it brings the album home with haunting, distorted guitars that sound somehow like hope itself.

“The hope is, I really want this to work, but I also feel kind of horrible,” she said. “That one’s nuanced.”

Other tracks are more literal. With its slinky bassline, Old Glove tells the true story of an ex-lover who accidentally broke her finger while playing catch in a cemetery. The moment left behind a (literally) painful reminder of their relationship’s end.

Rating System details a high school ex-boyfriend’s habit of rating women by identifying them with natural phenomena. Ms. Yukevich started off as “hurricane” but was ultimately promoted to “waterfall.”

She can’t help but wonder if any of her subjects have noticed themselves in her lyrics.

“Sometimes I’m like, he follows me on Instagram,” she said with a laugh, thinking about the man who throws the fastball in Old Glove. “Has he heard the song? Does he know what I’m talking about?”

Ms. Yukevich said she finds inspiration as a songwriter in the work of Paul McCartney and the 1980s English pop-rock outfit Prefab Sprout, which she discovered while exercising on an elliptical at the Mansion House gym in Vineyard Haven.

She sees an openness to discovery as the key to developing both musically and personally.

“You should approach life like a baby alien, like you don’t know anything and you’re incredibly curious,” she said.

For some discoveries, she needed to look no further than the Vineyard’s own music scene, at once larger than life and impossibly intimate. She values learning from and working with her contemporaries, including Brazilian Island guitarist Lucas Ostinato, and reveres longtime Vineyard legends such as Carly Simon and James Taylor.

“It’s an incredible fountain to drink from as a kid,” she said.

Despite being supported by the Vineyard’s nurturing artistic cocoon, for years she hesitated to tell people that she even knew how to play guitar.

“There was a long period of my life where I was like, being a singer-songwriter is really cringe,” she said. “There was serious self-doubt. Everything that I loved was wrong for a long time.”

For Ms. Yukevich, releasing The Good Ones meant liberating herself from the insecurity that once held her back.

“It took a lot emotionally for me to be able to stand behind my work,” she said.