I love men. Talking with them, dancing with them, fucking them. I’m a fan. I have also sat across from one at dinner while he explained something about women to me with the confidence of a man delivering the fucking Gettysburg Address. That particular contradiction can make your eye twitch. You can adore the guy beside you and still want to throw a chair through the window of the system that keeps handing men control over women’s bodies. Nikki Sorrentino knows those feelings can coexist. I Love A Man, But comes straight out of that messy little intersection, where loving men and being furious about what men in power keep doing to women are sharing a table and somebody has already ordered another bottle.
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The retro soul gives that anger a gorgeous vintage frame. Cynthia Tolson’s strings open the track with a deliberate nod toward This Is a Man’s World, while Spencer Hattendorf’s production keeps the live instrumentation front and center. Nikki has said the song began as a poem and a “rage release,” and you can hear why she wanted actual musicians in the room. There’s flesh and friction in the arrangement that suits a song born from anger rather than sanding it down into another polished empowerment number. The whole thing carries the elegance of classic soul while Nikki sounds ready to start some shit in 2026.
That title is where the song gets delicious. Nikki is happily married. She loves men. She also wrote I Love A Man, But partly out of her anger over the overturning of Roe v. Wade, saying, “I don’t believe men should legislate what women do with their own bodies.” Girlfriend, there it fucking is. Loving a man does not require smiling sweetly while powerful men make decisions about your uterus. I can love the one sleeping beside me and still look at the larger male delegation and wonder who the fuck put these guys in charge of my reproductive system.
Her disillusionment reaches into war and the human cost of political power too. Nikki describes watching ordinary people and families suffer while profit and political gain come first for men in power. That makes the feminine rage here feel focused rather than decorative. She knows exactly what she’s pissed about. Plenty of women know the bizarre emotional gymnastics of loving individual men while looking at male-dominated institutions and thinking, seriously, boys, what the fuck are we doing?
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That anger fits the larger story of Nikki Sorrentino, a New York-born singer-songwriter who came close to walking away from music before rebuilding her career around the woman she actually wanted to be. Her vocals for I Love A Man, But were recorded at Jungle City Studios, with the track recorded at Mission Sound in her hometown. She says she eventually realized that “all I needed to do was be myself… very loudly and it all fell into place.” Apparently very loudly works. A recent Instagram clip of the song reached more than half a million viewers, with women around the world responding before the record had much time to make its way around.
Maybe that response makes sense because I Love A Man, But gives women room for a contradiction we already understand. I can love a man enough to steal his T-shirt and crawl into his bed while remaining fucking furious about what men in power are doing outside the bedroom. Nikki Sorrentino puts retro soul behind that feeling and lets the feminine rage have the microphone. The men we love can stay. The men who think they get to run our bodies can get the fuck out.
