Cyndi Thomson on Choosing Faith Over Fame

Photo by Kate Clark.

In an industry that thrives on noise, Cyndi Thomson found power in stepping away.

Thomson, a Georgia-born singer-songwriter, burst onto the country music scene in 2001 as a fresh-faced 24-year-old with a voice that was angelic yet deeply grounded. Her first single, “What I Really Meant to Say,” which sounds like a track straight out of a Gilmore Girls episode, was a No. 1 hit on the Billboard Hot Country charts, and her debut album, My World, achieved RIAA certified gold status. Thomson subsequently made her Grand Ole Opry debut, appeared on Live with Regis and Kelly, performed on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno and at the 2001 CMA Awards, and even opened for Alan Jackson on his 2002 Drive Tour.

Her name was suddenly everywhere. And then, just as swiftly, it wasn’t.

In a heartfelt but shocking letter that Thomson publicly shared in late 2002, she announced that she had decided to walk away from her career as a recording artist. Twenty-three years later, Thomson tells me that her decision was a result of internal turmoil and fear that she had begun to experience at the time.

“To try to process that journey was very difficult for me,” Thomson explains of her rise to country music fame. “It was very fast-paced and I was trying to make everybody happy. All the while, I started having panic attacks and night terrors where I would just not sleep and wake up on the tour bus frightened.” The fear and anxiety Thomson experienced escalated to the point where she could no longer function. She was put on antidepressants as a result.

“None of it made any sense to me because I was doing something that I’d always dreamed of doing and I knew God had opened that door for me, so it was a lot of pressure,” she recalls. Thomson then spent eight months praying and having candid conversations with the Lord about how best to move forward. “I knew that the right decision was to truly lay it down and that, to me, meant walking away, taking whatever time I needed, and then letting God do the rest,” she confides.

The My World album cover.

Once the metaphorical spotlight had officially dimmed and there were no more songs to record, tours, or interviews, Thomson was left grappling with her identity. Although she initially struggled and had doubts about her decision to step into a normal life, Thomson doesn’t have any regrets. “I always knew I would sing again,” she tells me. “I just didn’t know what it would look like.”

In the interim, Thomson became a stay at home mother of two and started her own jewelry company, Haybelle Co. Yet, she always left one foot in the door of Nashville’s country music scene. “I missed singing so much,” Thomson admits. “I would look back a lot, longing for it, almost grieving the loss of something that really mattered to me.” That longing led her to continue to write songs and, eventually, self-release an EP, This Time, in 2009. Thomson has not released another project since then – until now.

Today marks Thomson’s official and triumphant return to life as a recording artist with the release of her six-track EP, Acres of Diamonds. The title track, Thomson shares, is about everything she’s been doing since her formal exit from the industry in 2002 – namely, building a different kind of dream life with her husband of twenty-three years, Daniel Goodman. “The acres of diamonds are our kids and the life we’ve built together,” Thomson explains. “I’ve been raising a family and just living a very simple life, but one that, for me, holds a lot of value and is something I always dreamt about.”

“Yeah, we’re standing on steady ground/Watching everything we planted grow/We could have gone down a different road/But look at us now we would’ve missed out on/Acres of Diamonds/Mountains of gold,” Thomson muses on “Acres of Diamonds.”

The EP also features a nostalgic ballad about wanting to relive major life moments (“Five More Minutes”), as well as a cover of Harry Styles’s “Falling,” and a collaboration with Ashley Monroe of Pistol Annies fame (“Black Celica”).

The Acres of Diamonds EP Cover.

According to Thomson, the catalyst behind her desire to record again was, in part, experiences she had while promoting her jewelry company. Every time Thomson would drop jewelry off for another artist or watch one of her singer-songwriter friends perform on stage or grace a red carpet wearing a custom piece that she had made, she felt a deep sense of longing to partake in the craft that she had once mastered so well. “It was a different vantage point, which made me go, ‘Okay, there’s something in my belly that’s on fire. I’ve got to do this.’ So, I just started praying through that and kinda kept it to myself,” Thomson tells me.

Thomson’s father then became critically ill. A surreal moment with him just prior to his passing further solidified her decision to return to music. “I walked into his room and sat down and just talked to him about Jesus and his life as a Marine. It was such precious time to get to hear my father talk about his daughters and the family that he had created with my mom, and that he was so proud of us,” she says. Thomson then told him she was sorry that she never got to play the Opry for him again. “That night, I just really processed what we had talked about, and I was like, ‘What am I doing? Would I want Bella, my daughter, to visit me, knowing that I was going to pass, and me say to her, ‘I wish I had made another record?’ I didn’t want that for her and I didn’t want it for me.”

The next day, Thomson drove around her hometown of Tifton, Georgia, down all the backroads that inspired My World all those years ago, reminiscing on her adolescence and confiding in God about her deep desire to make a new record. “It all really happened over a two-day period where I just was like, ‘Okay, this is what I’m going to do,’ and I had no idea how I was going to do it at all – there was no record label, no songs, no money – it was like, ‘How do I do this?’” Thomson shares.

A spring break trip to Charleston with her kids then led Thomson to reconnect with Tommy Lee James, who co-wrote and produced My World. “My family and I went over to his house one Friday night to catch up and, at some point in the night, I just said, ‘Do you want to go sing?’ We went into his music room and we started to sing the songs we had written for My World. After a couple of them, I said, ‘Do you want to help me write a record?’ and he said, ‘Yes.’” By Monday, James was in Nashville penning new songs with Thomson.

While the songwriting process hasn’t changed since Thomson’s early days as an artist, she’s come to find that the recording process is drastically different. “Back in the early 2000s, you would go and rent a studio for maybe three months and you’d work on the songs and bring in a full band and work on a project for hours every day,” Thomson shares. “Now, you can do it in your house in a matter of a couple weeks, maybe a little longer,” she says, laughing.

Today, Thomson balances writing and recording new music with all of the demands that come along with being a successful small business owner. Just last year, Thomson was asked to make a custom rosary piece for Olivia Culpo’s wedding bouquet, which ended up being photographed by Jose Villa and graced the pages of Vogue.

“Olivia’s best friend reached out to me because she knew that I liked to make one-of-a-kind pieces, and she talked to me about an idea that Olivia’s mom and grandmother had,” Thomson says of the wedding planning. “I jumped in and said I would love to do it, so Olivia’s mom mailed me Olivia’s great-grandmother’s rosary and I made so many pieces out of it,” she shares, laughing.

The custom pieces included bracelets to which Thomson attached initialed Victorian era love tokens for both of Culpo’s sisters, as well as the piece for Culpo’s wedding bouquet, which included an antique chain with a love token with Christian McCaffrey’s initials inscribed on it – which Thomson spent months searching for – and a vintage silver locket that Culpo used to put a picture of her and McCaffrey’s beloved toy golden doodle, Oliver Sprinkles, inside.

“That’s kind of the premise of Haybelle,” Thomson explains of her business. “We find things that have been lost or broken and we bring them back to life and restore them and make them into something new, much like God does with people.”

Olivia Culpo’s wedding bouquet, featuring a custom Haybelle Co. piece. Photo by Jose Villa.

In many ways, Cyndi Thomson’s return to music mirrors the very heart of her jewelry business. What once seemed lost or left behind was never gone – it was just waiting to be restored, refined, and reimagined. With Acres of Diamonds, Thomson isn’t chasing after what once was. Rather, she is standing tall in the life she has built for herself – a life that is marked by grace, class, and an unshakeable belief that everything unfolds in its own divine time. Like the vintage chains and forgotten tokens that Thomson brings back to life, Thomson has taken her own story – full of beauty and heartbreak – and crafted something brand new. Something that sparkles with meaning. Something that was there all along, just waiting to be uncovered.

“I could’ve never imagined this story,” Thomson shares of the way her life has played out. “But I’m madly in love with it. You can dream big in any stage of life – you really can. You just have to trust God.”