Going back more than a decade, Nashville songsmith Tim Easton has marked the Thanksgiving season with a special recording to benefit great nonprofit SAFPAW. The organization, whose full name is Southern Alliance for People and Animal Welfare, helps people and pets in need with a focus on the unhoused community and folks who live at or near the poverty line.
A couple years ago, Easton made the shift from doing a Dylan cover to coming up with an original special song. This time out, his offering is “Joni’s Song,” a hymn-like tune on which he plays a four-string tenor guitar that Fanny’s House of Music restored for him. The piece is about the connection between people and their pets, which can be more direct and less judgmental or conditional than relationships between people — or between people and the divine, as filtered through other people, anyway.
“There have been way too many dogs and cats passing in my family and friend’s lives recently,” Easton writes in a release. “I wanted to honor that with a song a wrote about the passing of our rescued and beloved Akita. Yes, she was named after Joni Mitchell, whose spirit has inhabited this song. … Thanks for sharing song this with your dog-loving friends who may be interested in this amazing nonprofit that does the work that is difficult to do.”
We’re pleased to share the video above, which features photos of pets of Easton’s friends who have died recently. Snag a copy via Bandcamp, and donate directly to SAFPAW via their website.
