“Enough for You” was written by Josh Miller, a banjo player and songwriter whose own playing has taken him through NewFound Road, the Lovell Sisters’ band and Carrie Hassler and Hard Rain. Russell Moore & IIIrd Tyme Out cut it at Southern Ground Studios in Nashville for It’s About Tyme, released on Break a String Records on 4 September 2015 — Moore singing lead and playing guitar, with Wayne Benson on mandolin, Keith McKinnon on banjo, Justen Haynes on fiddle and Ray Deaton on bass.
The lyric sets two people on opposite sides of a line neither of them drew. He was born to a farmer and raised a simple man; she was born to the city and, as he puts it, not meant for callused hands. He tried to make her see how he felt and lost anyway, and the verse allows that she was worth the fight regardless. What lifts the song above the ordinary is the second verse, which arrives years later: he has heard she married, that her husband is kind, and he has seen the pictures of her baby. He says plainly that he would not change how it turned out — and then admits the memory still hurts.
The refrain carries the whole argument in four lines. He was in love with her and did anything she wanted; the one thing he failed to do was ever be enough. Moore, a repeat winner of the IBMA’s Male Vocalist of the Year award, sings it without pushing, which is what lets the last line land.
