When Becca Mancari thinks of her childhood, she remembers constant strangers congregating in her basement and a circus tent on her lawn. Her parents ran a church out of their own home in rural Pennsylvania, and it wasn’t until later, in her adulthood, when Mancari recognized it for what it really was.

“I was basically in a Christian, hippie cult,” she tells them. Yet she knew from an early age that she was queer, even if she didn’t have the language for it. When she finally came out to her parents at age 21, her parents shunned her, forbade her from seeing her siblings, and left her to be homeless — sending her off onto a tumultuous odyssey that found her hopping from Arizona to South Florida and India to South Florida again, until she eventually moved to Nashville (where she’s now based) to fulfill her dreams of being a musician.

Now, for the first time, Mancari is telling her full life story — and the lessons she learned growing up gay within a fundamentalist community — on her forthcoming sophomore solo album, The Greatest Part (out June 26 on Captured Tracks). Produced by Zac Farro of Paramore, the record distills the painful trauma of her past into dreamy indie pop songs that bounce with a funk groove.

It's a huge leap from the folk rock she made for her 2017 debut album Good Woman and with the side project Bermuda Triangle, alongside Brittany Howard of Alabama Shakes. Instead, Mancari wanted to go back to the indie rock that she grew up with to create a project rooted in the personal, but felt universal. “I wanted to write a record that made you feel good to listen to but also really address the hard stuff, like the Beach Boys,” she says. “I just wanted to make a record that made people feel less alone. It's not my story — it's your story, it's all of our stories.”

That’s why she called a bunch of fellow queer Nashville residents to take part in the album’s second single, “First Time.” The track itself is about Becca’s coming out; “I wrote the song to my younger self,” she explains. “I had tears in my eyes when I wrote it, like, Can you find a way out? Can you still love that little person inside of you?”