At age 13, I watched “Woodstock” on DVD with my dad, whose joy whenever Santana’s “Soul Sacrifice” came on defeats any other display of happiness I have ever witnessed. Even though the Colombian virtuoso guitarist’s performance stuck with me for a long time, it was Janis Joplin who captivated me the most with sheer vocal range and an infinite passion for her music.

Her lyrics incorporated heartache and loss, she gave the impression of enduring pain at her shows, as she resisted a crippling need to burst into tears before her audience.

Years later, I still wish Joplin had provided the industry with a successor. She passed before I was even born. Her genre, no longer commercially viable in today’s music business, has stepped aside and let the Lordes and Lana del Reys take over.

I don’t mind songs like “Royals” or “Tennis Court” — I might not choose to play them on Spotify on my way to work, but I won’t turn off the radio if my favorite station plays one of them. Or, so I thought.

Then, Zella Day and her eponymous EP stumbled into my life.

Full disclosure: I enjoyed parts of it. There is a certain daring quality to her vocal style that enticed me.

Nevertheless, I realized that’s not the real me. That’s the “me” who zones out while songs like Magic’s “Rude” plays on the radio as he drives home, and refuses to change the station because he doesn’t even want to bother with other tunes and, to paraphrase John Cusack in High Fidelity, “just wants something he can ignore.”

The other “me,” the one who cares about what he listens to and reviews albums for the Sunflower, despises artists whose lackadaisical tendencies lead them to craft uninspired albums that rehash old melodies and disguise them as original songwriting.

 That’s the “me” that can’t for the life of him savor a single second of Zella Day’s EP, simply because it sounds like everything I have heard in the last three days. Why not try something new? A co-worker informed me (mere seconds before I started this critique) about Pink’s latest folk effort, which filled me with wonder, given her previous preferred genre.

Why can’t other artists try something new?