“I’ve got 25 years of credibility built up, and this isn’t something I’ve moved into lightly,” Bruce Springsteen says on the eve of his first Vote for Change concert in Philadelphia this Friday. “But this is the one where you spend some of that credibility. It’s an emergency intervention.”

Or as one of America’s great musicians explained in a recent New York Times Op-Ed, “Personally, for the last twenty five years I have always stayed one step away from partisan politics…This year, however, for many of us the stakes have risen too high to sit this election out.”

So, putting his music where his mouth is, Springsteen–along with Dave Matthews, the Dixie Chicks, Babyface, R.E.M, John Fogerty and more than a dozen other musicians–will be fanning out to play concerts in the battleground states. Kicking off on October 1 and running through 8, the concerts will raise money for America Coming Together to conduct voter education and go door-to-door to assist people in getting to the polls on November 2.

Rock historian Dave Marsh says in a recent USA Today article that the scale of Vote for Change has been rivaled only by Amnesty’s 1988 International Human Rights Now! Tour. Another pop music critic compared the marshaling of musical talent behind the upcoming concerts to “a fervor that hasn’t been witnessed since musicians in the late ’60s united to protest Richard M. Nixon and America’s involvement in the Vietnam War.”

In a recent interview in Rolling Stone magazine, Springsteen spoke with RS editor Jann Wenner about his conscience, the upcoming election, and the relationship of an artist to his audience and politics. Click here to check out (and pass around) the interview. It is well worth reading–and keeping by your side–in these next weeks. And it’s not too late to buy tix to one of the concerts by clicking here.