brett dennen

In an age of Facebook, Twitter and any number of social media outlets capable of documenting the minutia of your day to day life, sometimes something as simple as the lost art of the phone call serves as the best way to connect with someone on a personal level. For their latest social activism campaign, HeadCount is doing just that by taking a back to basics approach in order to remind people to head to the polls to exercise the Constitutional right to vote in next Tuesday’s mid-term elections.

The non-partisan organization, that was founded in 2004 by Andy Bernstein and Disco Biscuits bassist Marc Brownstein, and has helped register over 175,000 people, has enlisted a impressive roster of musicians from the indie to jam world, that includes Jim James (MMJ), Willie Nelson, ?uestlove, Matt Berninger (The National), Jon Fishman (Phish) and Warren Haynes (ABB, Gov’t Mule) to not only pre-record reminder messages, but also make live personal calls to a select number of the approximately 25,000 people who have made a “Pledge to Vote” via HeadCount.

In a media conference call yesterday to talk about the inventive initiative, HeadCount board member Bob Weir (Grateful Dead/Furthur) stressed the importance of a “Vote For You” mentality, saying that young people need to take the future into consideration and participate instead of letting a bunch of “crusty old folks” made the decisions that have direct impact on their lives and those of future generations. Weir, who joked that his call list was so large he better get to work on it immediately, said that would seize the opportunity to talk to people to help figure out where the organization’s efforts will be centered in the future.

READ ON for more from HeadCount’s conference call…