“The Answer” is a country prayer set to melody—an invitation to stop running in circles and finally rest your worries on something steadier than your own strength.
Before the feeling takes over, it helps to anchor the record straight away. “The Answer” is the closing track on Josh Turner’s fourth studio album Haywire, released February 9, 2010 on MCA Nashville, produced by Frank Rogers. It was not promoted as one of the album’s official radio singles (those were “Why Don’t We Just Dance,” “All Over Me,” and “I Wouldn’t Be a Man”), which means there isn’t a Billboard singles-chart debut position to report for “The Answer” at the time of release. Instead, its “ranking” story is tied to the album that carried it: Haywire debuted at No. 5 on the Billboard 200 and No. 2 on Top Country Albums, selling 85,000 copies in its first week.
And yet, it’s often the non-singles—the songs that weren’t sent out with promotional muscle—that end up staying the closest. “The Answer” feels built for that kind of staying. It doesn’t chase the listener; it waits, patient and plainspoken, like a light left on in the kitchen.
The song was co-written by Josh Turner and Mark Narmore, and the heart of its origin is disarmingly simple: Turner had been carrying the title idea “Jesus Is the Answer” for a long time, without knowing exactly how to complete it. When he brought it to Narmore—one of his close friends—the song finally found its shape. That detail matters because it explains the song’s tone. “The Answer” doesn’t feel like a carefully engineered “inspirational moment.” It feels like two writers finishing each other’s thoughts—two men trying to say, in plain language, what you reach for when the world gets too loud and your own plans start slipping through your hands.
Musically, the placement as the album’s final track is almost a statement of intent. Haywire is full of energy and mainstream country polish, but the closer turns the lights down. The production team around Frank Rogers frames Turner’s baritone in a way that lets it sound less like performance and more like testimony—warm, grounded, and unhurried. You can hear the craft in the credits too: the recording was done across major Nashville-area studios, and the album sessions list a choir specifically on track 11—“The Answer”—which helps explain that lift you feel as the song builds toward release.
But the deeper power of “The Answer” is lyrical, and it’s emotional in a way that sneaks up on you. It speaks directly to the person who is “out there wondering,” who looks at their own life and can’t quite explain how they arrived at the mess they’re in. It names that specific kind of fatigue—the weary self-accusation, the sense of being undeserving of forgiveness—and then answers it with a sentence so old it has become new again in every generation: Jesus is the answer.
What makes it resonate is that it doesn’t pretend confusion isn’t real. It doesn’t scold. It doesn’t posture. It simply offers a handrail. And in that, Josh Turner is doing something he’s always done well: using a big, unmistakable voice to deliver something gentle. Country music has never been only about Saturday nights; it’s also been about Sunday mornings—about the after, the reckoning, the quiet decision to live differently. “The Answer” sits right in that lineage, where faith isn’t decoration, but a way of enduring.
There’s a particular kind of comfort in hearing a singer known for radio swagger step into humility without changing who he is. Turner doesn’t abandon his identity here; he deepens it. The song becomes less about a tidy resolution and more about a steadying presence—something you can return to when your thoughts won’t stop racing. In the end, “The Answer” isn’t trying to be trendy, or clever, or even surprising. It’s trying to be true. And sometimes, in a life crowded with noise, truth is the rarest hook of all.
