This is because Dockery is young. He is 21 years old. A member of a close and numerous extended family, he spent his earliest days in Lake Placid and grew up in Keene Valley.

“I’m still connected to my little kid self,” he says, referring to the importance of emotional honesty in his music.

COVID hit in the spring of his 10th grade year at Keene Central School; everyone had to go home.

“At the time,” he said, ” we thought it would be for two weeks.”

But COVID raged on.

“In 11th grade, we had the choice to go back to school or go online with Zoom,” he added. “I went back to school. In senior year, I was half-day at KCS, half- day at CV-TEC in Mineville.”

CV-TEC stands for Career and Technical Education at Champlain Valley Educational Services. CV-TEC provides career preparation programs and services for secondary and post-secondary students in Clinton and Essex counties in New York. He continued his CV-TEC classes after senior year, studying cosmetology, which included classes in human anatomy for which he earned science credit.

At C-VTEC Dockery learned how to cut hair, and is even good at cutting his own. Barbering is a skill he can always use to make money, but that isn’t his preferred vocation.

He has been working as a sales clerk at the Birch Store in Keene Valley. Four days a week, he waits table at Forty Six, a restaurant in Keene, where he is learning to tend bar. For Dockery, the work “has been a good experience,” teaching him skills he can take with him in the future.

Tall and slender — Dockery stands over 6 feet tall–he was drawing the comment “You should be a model!” on a regular basis. Now, having had some experience, “I’m getting some head shots taken and trying to get into agencies.”

Music is Dockery’s true vocation.

He has been writing songs, composing on his own for more than two years now using Pro tools end-to-end software, a sophisticated digital audio work station that allows a musician to create, record, edit, and mix audio with various instrumental layers and sound effects.

He would also like to — someday — make music with other musicians, but for now he creates his music all by himself. He has tried different professional names, settling on, for the present, “Nevy,” a nickname that has followed him through the years since early childhood. On Spotify he is Nevy; on social media, including Instagram, he is nevybynight.

An Adirondack native and year-round resident, Dockery nevertheless enjoys travel. He loves the energy of New York City, where he has has friends, and would like to live there someday. He enjoyed visiting his brother, Miles, in Munster, Germany, and he wrote the song “Projection” in Cornwall, sitting on a cliff over the sea. When asked what that was like, he replied “It was windy.”

In music, he believes in taking risks.

“The challenge to be an artist is to tell the truth, one’s own truth, and then there’s the realization that others recognize themselves,” he said.

The goal is “to create something that moves people,” that “makes people free.” To do so, it is important to “drop that wall of shame … Music is brutally honest … I wear it on my sleeve, on my face, so that people can see.”

In For the Birds: Arts and Literary Magazine, he wrote: “I find honesty and vulnerability in sharing experiences with taboo subjects like sex, isolation and detachment more valuable now than ever … I hope to offer a hand to … anybody struggling with their identity in such politically charged times.”

Dockery’s first song is “Tabuu.” Its title comes from the character Tabuu, the main antagonist in a Nintendo platform fighting video game.

While its naming sounds playful, the song,“is about conflict, about a heartbreaking time for me. It was the first song I ever finished; I made something beautiful out of a hard time.”

Other popular Spotify tracks by Nevy include: “Orbit,” Projection,” “When it Rains” and “Bleeding.”

Dockery plans to come out with his first album before 2026. It will be original.

“I don’t like people to put me in a box,” he said.