It happened. The thing none of us wanted to happen, happened.
Before we get there (here), let me rewind. In 2016, I reconnected with an old friend who, in the years since we’d seen each other, had fallen deep into the hole of addiction. Within a few weeks, I was taking her to Heroin Anonymous meetings; thankfully, she was willing to go. Soon it became a carpool to HA, piling five-deep into my Honda Civic to rally for recovery for Kristin, Nik, Semalea, and Cheyenne (all friends I’d lost touch with). Aside from meetings, I tried to keep us busy doing as many everyday-type things we could do, well into 2017. Me, desperate to help my friends; them, along for the ride, with still-drifting minds. They eventually slipped back into their own worlds. I dreamed they wouldn’t lose sight of the hope we shared.
I lost Kristin to overdose in 2020, which I wrote about in a Flyer column, titled “Heroin, the Thief.” Nik left us in 2021; Semalea in 2022. And as deeply as it hurts to say, Cheyenne lost his years-long battle as well, on July 3, 2025.
Cheyenne Marrs was a lifelong musician, and a personal friend for about 30 years. I can hardly look at Facebook since the news broke Sunday because it’s filled with memorial posts I’m not prepared to see. But seeing them — from other Memphis musicians, people he’d helped along their own recovery journeys, the mother of his new daughter, his family, and many friends — has shown just how much of an impact he made, even as he walked in his own darkness. He was connected to the fabric of this city, whether he served you a cup of coffee at Java Cabana, cracked you up with his goofy sense of humor at an open mic or elsewhere, made you feel comfortable at a recovery meeting, caught your ear from on stage at a local venue, or asked you for a cigarette (IYKYK).
Cheyenne was always making music, able to impressively play any instrument, sing, and write since youth. Music was in his genes and woven into every aspect of his life. I wrote about his solo debut album, Everybody Wants to Go Home, as a Best of Memphis staff pick in 2023, shortly after its release. We don’t usually cover our friends, but the recognition was well-deserved. It wasn’t because he was my friend; it was because it was a damn good album. I listened to it a dozen or more times, beginning to end, before writing about it. (And kept it on repeat long after.)
Cheyenne had recorded the bulk of the album while on drug court, working toward a year of sobriety at the time, if I recall. In the album’s lyrics, he so poignantly described the roller coaster of addiction, the void that can’t be filled, the push and pull of recovery attempts, the devastation and isolation in the wake of it all. I heard it as a healing album, but in retrospect, it was as much a confession: Addiction is a dark and lonely place, and I can pretend I’m okay sometimes, but it keeps knocking, and I don’t know how to stop it.
Cheyenne was like many brilliant, sincere, effortlessly creative people who get lost in the depths of addiction. An artist’s awareness can also be their greatest cause of suffering. Cheyenne felt deeply — you can hear it in his music. Sometimes all those big feelings become too much. Sometimes we have to watch our loved ones fight the urge to numb those feelings, fall, and get up again. Hoping they get up again. I wish Cheyenne, my dear, sweet friend, could have been that HA success story. But, sadly, it happened.
I’d hoped the next time I wrote about Cheyenne or saw him in the Flyer’s pages, it’d be upon the release of his next album, one he was working on before his recent “slip,” as he called it. But here we are. I listened to Everybody Wants to Go Home in full again while writing this. What a beautiful gift he’s left us. What a tragedy.
Cheyenne sang throughout the record about a home he couldn’t pinpoint. A yearning to get out of this place “everybody knows not to visit,” “this hell, all alone,” to a safe place without suffering.
I hope you made your way home, my friend. We love you.