E-Mail This Article to a Friend VOTE Music for America wants you BY DEIRDRE FULTON

Young Boston scenesters will be able to kill two birds with one song at upcoming shows like Xiu Xiu (this Friday at Cambridge’s Zeitgeist Gallery) and Death Cab for Cutie (April 3 at Boston’s Avalon). These bands and others have joined Music for America (MfA), a nonprofit, progressive political group that brings its message to concerts nationwide, hoping to educate and register young voters.

The organization, co-founded a little more than a year ago by three young Howard Dean enthusiasts, is not aligned with one specific party, nor does it endorse a specific candidate. It does, however, have two overriding goals: removing President George W. Bush from the White House, and mobilizing a generation of voters often dismissed as apathetic or uninvolved. On the latter issue, 23-year-old Dan Droller, a Harvard University graduate and MfA co-founder, says: "It’s a load of crap. There are so many things that we care about."

Armed with voter-registration forms, sign-up sheets and "issue cards" that explain how young people are affected by current administration policies, MfA volunteers staff tables at shows. They hand out "Voter X Kits" — packets of 10 registration forms for already-registered voters to distribute among their unregistered friends. In the days leading up to Super Tuesday, MfA reached more than 20,000 people at 65 shows, says spokeswoman Melanie Nutter.

When people first read the issue cards or talk to volunteers, "usually they don’t know this stuff is going on," says co-founder Franz Hartl, 26. "And once they know, they’re outraged." (MfA focuses on issues related to media consolidation, the war on terror, the drug war, higher education, youth-services funding, and the environment.) It’s easier to get involved than people might think, he adds: "You can become political without changing your lifestyle." The MfA artists, who range from the well-known (Sonic Youth, Modest Mouse, Ryan Adams) to the less so (Under Investigation, the Catheters), vary on the spectrum of political activism. But "we just ask them to tell a story," Droller says, adding that artists have much at stake in this election. "It is becoming clearer and clearer how much politics affects culture." (For instance, the group blames media consolidation for high CD prices, the fact that many radio stations play the same songs, and the RIAA’s focus on prosecuting online music downloaders rather than getting more music out to more listeners.)

With only nine full-time staffers (most are based at the organization’s headquarters in Redwood City, California, while others work in satellite offices in Brooklyn and Seattle), MfA depends on a network of volunteers. Over the next few months, state coordinators in "battleground states" will be working to increase voter participation and mobilization, Nutter says. Volunteers will attend summer tours and festivals. And MfA will continue working in collaboration with other groups in the America Votes Coalition, like the Sierra Club, ACORN, and MoveOn.org, to spread the liberal word in cities and towns across the nation. One-on-one interaction means more to young people than 30-second TV ads do, Hartl says. "We’re savvy. Slick ads might get the Social Security crowd, but they’re not going to get us."

For more information, visit http://www.musicforamerica.org/.