If you’re a Richmond-area musician and you’ve released a song within the last decade or so, chances are Doug Nunnally heard it—and he wants others to hear it, too.
The founder of local music website The Auricular is on a mission to discover and amplify Central Virginia’s emerging musical talent. In addition to weekly concert recommendations, Nunnally’s site runs articles sharing descriptions and links for hundreds of tracks and albums by local acts, and he regularly takes to the Auricular’s socials to post “On This Day…” reminders of memorable albums from the past.
“I feel like I have a responsibility to the musicians in the city,” he says. “Not just when I miss things, but when I don’t have time for things, it weighs on me heavily.”
Nunnally was big into band as a student at Mills E. Godwin High School, learning everything from baritone sax to French horn, but plans to become a music teacher eventually morphed into a passion for music writing. In addition to RVA Magazine, he’s been published by Uproxx, NME, Consequence and the Village Voice, among other outlets, and he’s still chasing the thrill of discovering a new favorite song. “You stumble across something that makes not just your eyes open, but you can feel your ears open to it,” he says.
Nunnally has long served as a liaison in Richmond’s live music scene, whether he’s texting last-minute lineup options when a band drops off a concert bill, advising the organizers of the recent Stomping Grounds local showcases, or curating a series of in-store performances at Plan 9. He’s also president and founder of the Newlin Music Prize, which bestows an annual honor, as well as a cash prize, on the best album from the Richmond-Petersburg area. He designed the nomination process with genre diversity in mind and hopes that recognizing bands’ hard work leads to more musical output.
“Some of these bands exist just to get to the finish line of our project,” he notes. “It is a coin flip of whether they’re going to keep going or not. If I can tip the scales to make it so that they keep going, I’m going to do that every time.”
