1928 was founded in Ann Arbor, Michigan in 2009 by composer Tucker Fuller and poet Megan Levad. With an assortment of conservatory-trained vocalists and instrumentalists, Mr. Fuller and Miss Levad write ballad cycles for dive bar and cabaret venues. 1928 has had performances in New York, Boston, and New Orleans. They are inspired by Beirut, Schubert, Schumann, Dolly Parton, Nico, Gillian Welch, Bobby Darin, Marlene Dietrich, The Magnetic Fields, Talking Heads, Nina Simone, Woody Guthrie, Jacques Brel, Keats, Yeats, Willie Nelson, Emily Dickinson, Radiolab, Anne Sexton, Sappho, Terrence Malick, hootenannies, decorum, and an ethos of radical beauty.
Megan Levad is a graduate of The University of Iowa and the University of Michigan, where she received the Roethke Prize and the Zell Postgraduate Fellowship, and where she now runs the Zell Visiting Writers Series. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in Fence, Granta Online, Tin House, and other journals, as well as the Everyman's Library anthology Killer Verse, which features the text of “American Murderer,” written for the ballad cycle Murder (composed by Tucker Fuller).