Late rapper Eyedea returns on a 14-song album built from AI-cloned vocals

A new 14-song album from Saint Paul rapper Eyedea is out now, 16 years after he died. The voice on it was rebuilt with AI. Eyedea, born Michael ‘Mikey’ Larsen, died in 2010, but his mother kept boxes of his handwritten teenage lyrics, and a team of local producers used those pages, old recordings, and an AI voice model to finish the record.

The album, 15-Year-Old Shit Talking, came out through Crushkill Recordings, the label Eyedea founded, and is on most streaming platforms and on CD through Bandcamp. As the Star Tribune reported, it aims to capture the teenage rap-battle energy that made Eyedea a cult figure in the Rhymesayers-era Twin Cities underground before his death.

How Eyedea’s voice was rebuilt from family archives

The record grew out of family archives, not a studio session. Kathy Larsen Averill, Eyedea’s mother, saved her son’s old material and brought in veteran local producers to shape it into songs. She has said the handwritten pages had started to fall apart over 15 years, and she wanted people to hear the words the way he would have rapped them.

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I wanted everyone else to hear what he wrote in his own voice.

The voice model needed human input to work. Averill and rappers Ecid and Brady O’Rourke recorded placeholder vocals that the AI then reshaped into Eyedea’s voice. The beats and instrumental parts came from people, not machines, including DJ Willy Lose and Big Jess of Unknown Prophets.

The mix is the point. The result is a reconstruction of Eyedea’s early voice and style, not a track spat out by a prompt.

Eyedea joins a growing wave of AI vocals for dead artists

Reviving a dead artist with AI is no longer rare. The surviving Beatles used machine learning to lift John Lennon’s vocals off an old demo for “Now and Then.” Netflix used an AI voice to recreate a late Red Hot Chili Peppers member in a recent documentary.

Consent is where these projects split. Tupac’s estate refused to allow an AI version of his voice in a video game. The Eyedea record sits on the other side: his own mother started it, ran it, and used lyrics he wrote himself.

The tools doing this are now cheap and easy to reach. The same AI voice cloning tools that rebuilt Eyedea can copy a living artist in minutes, which is why more singers are now moving to trademark their voices.

For independent artists, the Eyedea album is a preview of a choice your family or estate may face one day. AI can keep a catalog alive, or it can put words in your mouth you never wrote. The difference comes down to who holds the lyrics, who gives permission, and whether anyone is allowed to say no.