Nataan Hong was 11 years old when he made his 2017 debut on the IJ Lobby Lounge, a video and live music showcase for student musicians I produced for five seasons, from 2014 until the pandemic shut us down in 2020.

A keyboard player, he was one of the kids in Cubed, a precocious rock power trio formed at Brandeis Marin with his then 11-year-old classmates, guitarist Harrison Saltzman and drummer Ezra Rosen.

They were the youngest band I’d ever had on the show, and they were so phenomenally good, and so adorable, that I had them back for three consecutive seasons. So, in a sense, I have a kind of avuncular feeling about them, having watched them grow into teenagers and evolve as a band and as individual musicians.

All three are now seniors at the Marin School of the Arts and still perform as Cubed, but Nataan, who turned 18 this year, no longer has time to be a full-time member of the band. He’s been too busy with school and with his budding career as a pop music producer and as a composer for the Pokemon TV series.

At the moment, he’s excited about a new single he produced, “Hang Up, Move On,” that was released last week featuring 18-year-old singer-songwriter Sam Lethbridge, who performs under the mononym Parker, and 16-year-old singer-songwriter Naomi Jane Voigt, who goes by Naomi Jane. Nataan also uses just his first name professionally.

They wrote about a situation that many young people their age can relate to as they go about their separate lives after high school. In the song, Parker and Naomi Jane are a couple in a long-distance romance who are on the painful verge of breaking up over the phone.

Nataan met these two last summer at Prodigy Camp, a prestigious weeklong residential gathering in the woods of Washington state for a select group of gifted teenage singer-songwriters, filmmakers and musicians.

“We instantly clicked,” he said. “They came to me with the blueprint of the song. And when I heard it, I said, ‘I want to put my magic on this.’ We decided to do it as a joint thing. My job was to take it to the next level, musically and emotionally.”

After the camp, he and his two new collaborators got together again in Los Angeles to arrange, record and put the finishing touches on the song. Its style and sound were inspired by the ’80s synth sound of Chappell Roan, a newly minted pop star who had gone to Prodigy Camp and had come back as a mentor. At the time, she was on the verge of blowing up internationally with her debut studio album, “The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess,” and its hit single, “Pink Pony Club,” which she performed at this year’s Grammy Awards, winning best new artist. In its October 2024 cover story on her, Rolling Stone called her a “pop supernova.”

“The camp itself was a life-changing experience,” Nataan said. “It’s a full-on creativity camp. It’s about understanding yourself as a person so that you can then figure out how to tell your story through your music.”

He won a scholarship to the camp after one of his songs, “playin’,” which he wrote as a high school freshman and is sung by local vocalist Leah Nemo, was a finalist in the annual International Songwriting Competition.

As he looks to his future, his role models are Swedish producer Max Martin, a multiple Grammy winner who has worked with a galaxy of stars, including Katy Perry and the Weekend; and Jack Antonoff, another multiple Grammy winner best known for his hits with Taylor Swift.

“My ultimate goal is to co-write and produce for big names,” he said. “I love collaborating and bringing someone’s vision to life. Hopefully I can get somewhere close to that.”

As he finishes his senior year of high school, he devotes much of his waking time to working on theme songs and other music for the Japanese series Pokemon, an international anime sensation aimed at kids 8 to 10 years old. The music is composed and recorded by a Marin company, Madcap Labs, founded and headed by Ed Goldfarb, who had been music director of the San Francisco stage show “Beach Blanket Babylon” for a decade.

Goldfarb, who runs his company out of his home in Novato, brought Nataan on his four-member composing staff after seeing him perform an improvisational piano piece at an Marin School of the Arts student show. With Goldfarb, he co-wrote a theme song for the series last season and is learning orchestration. He also plays keys in Goldfarb’s band, Madcap Labs Live, which performs from 6 to 8 p.m. Thursdays at Trek Winery in Novato.

“Nataan has as good an ear as I’ve ever encountered,” Goldfarb said. “Something that he’s even better at than I am is circa 2025 pop music production. He’s been fascinated by it since he was a preteen. He has great innate talent.”

Nataan, who collected Pokemon cards when he was growing up, will often work late into the night on music for the show and other projects in the state-of-the-art studio at his home in Novato that he’s been building since he was a freshman at Marin School of the Arts. While supportive of their son’s ambition and drive, his parents worry about his demanding workload and singular focus.

“We have to help him moderate,” said his mother, Jennifer Grossman. “Most parents of teenagers are busy pushing their kids to go accomplish something. But we have to help him remember that sleep is important, that socializing is important. We’ve learned to get out of his way. We’re running behind him trying to catch up sometimes.”

While his former bandmates in Cubed are preparing to go to college after graduation in June, Nataan has decided to forego college and concentrate instead on taking advantage of the opportunities he’s being offered now as a professional composer and producer.

“It’s a big choice I made,” he said. “I thought about college for a bit. My grades are good, so I could have gone to a prestigious school. But I ended up deciding not to because the opportunity I have is the kind of opportunity I would look for after graduating from college. And I have it right now.”

Contact Paul Liberatore at p.liberatore@comcast.net