Songfacts®:

• The "man" in this song represents the patriarchy.
  
  "I know it might sound like it's from the perspective of maybe a bad man character or a mean male partner, but actually what I wanted to do for the song was write from the perspective of the man in my head," Mitski said. "I think no matter what gender you are there's the voice of a patriarch in your head, because we all live in and were raised in a patriarchy. I think what the male masculine voice is in your head depends on not just what gender you are but your interactions with male figures in your life and of course all the messaging you've received from the culture and the patriarchy around you."
  
  "I have found that the man in my head makes me believe some pretty unhelpful things, often toxic things about both myself and the world and other people," she added. "I always try to keep it in check, but I thought I should write a song where I give a voice to that to that man in my head and maybe it'll help me come to peace with it or free it up a little bit, kind of like that story of the Buddha when meditating to reach enlightenment, Mara comes in and tries to distract him or bother him. Mara is a demon god in the story of the Buddha. The Buddha responds by saying, 'I see you,' and then inviting Mara for tea and treating Mara like a special guest. I think there really is something to that and I wanted to try something similar by just being like, 'OK, patriarch in my mind, you have the floor. What do you want to say?' So that's where the song came from."
• Mitski wrote "I'm Your Man" on acoustic guitar, which is the lead instrument on the track. After she wrote it, she thought it was too short but didn't want to add more lyrics, so she brought in a chorus and had them sing like pirates - "yo-ho... yo-ho."
  
  "The pirates of the imagination are sort of masculine figures, and that leads me to my intention behind the song," Mitski explained.
• The last part of this song is filled with the sounds of barking dogs and the great outdoors. "I think the best thing about music is that you don't always have to have a coherent explanation as to why you put things in your music, and I don't really have a solid explanation as to why I heard those sounds in my head when imagining this part," Mitski said. "It was just like, this feels good, so I told Patrick Hyland, the producer, to find public domain sounds that are dogs barking and also outdoor night sounds like crickets and grass. He came through and he put both in."
• Somewhere in the mix is the sound of a Fowler's toad, a little guy with a loud call. It came from a sound effect that wasn't identified, so Mitski spent a lot of time on the internet sleuthing out what animal made the sound.