Inception ‘s Joseph Gordon-Levitt dreams of Carole King in a solo rendition of the singer/songwriter’s sultry anthem “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman” above. Sure, it’s raw, but so is feeling like a natural woman.
The warm, fuzzy performance was part of the Summer in the City series thrown by Gordon-Levitt’s crowdsourcing production company, hitRecord. Encouraging and exploiting the rich collaborative talent of internet users, hitRecord was launched in 2005 by Gordon-Levitt but has nicely evolved this year into a productive, professional art-and-media collective.
Check out the clip below for Gordon-Levitt’s amiable introduction to hitRecord’s standard operating procedure, which is a noble one in our increasingly worrisome era of tightening networks.
Gorgon-Levitt’s basic thesis — lengthily paraphrased as “Just hit the record button already!” — is a positive one. Nearly anyone, anywhere, can creatively contribute in the internet’s cloud like never before.
In the case of hitRecord, that encompasses everything from making and remixing films, music and animation to critiquing the material online so Gordon-Levitt and his team can more easily find collaborations worthy of handing off to the big shots in Hollywood. Profits from anything made by hitRecord are split 50-50 between the company and the artists. What could be more natural?
Well, other than an Inception star singing a ’60s hit recorded by Aretha Franklin (and revisited in the ’70s by King and later by a string of other female singers)?
“We don’t release copyrighted material on hitRecord.org,” Gordon-Levitt said of his unlikely homage on his Tumblr blog. “I wanted to do something just for that room at that time, nothing ‘productive.’ But of course, somebody recorded it and put it on YouTube, which is awesome.”
