Songfacts®:

• Eve calls "Gotta Man" a "thug love song"; it finds her rapping about standing by her man through thick and thin, even if he gets incarcerated. "I think a lot of people can relate to it," she told SonicNet. "Especially people from the streets."
• The "gotta man that I think I'm gonna love forever" hook is sung by Mashonda, who also sang on Jay-Z's "Girl's Best Friend" and appeared on "Get No Better" with Cassidy. She was married to Swizz Beatz before he took up with Alicia Keys.
• "Gotta Man" was produced by Swizz Beatz, who put together the quiet chorus that sounds a bit like a nursery rhyme. When Eve heard it, she knew it was something special. "You can't stop singing it after you hear it," she told MTV. "I was like, 'Yo, people are gonna be singing that song. Little kids and everything.'"
  
  Swizz told her to start writing the verses, and she did.
• This was the first single from Eve's debut album, Let There Be Eve...Ruff Ryders' First Lady; it helped the album debut at #1 in America, making Eve just the third female rapper to accomplish that feat (following Lauryn Hill and Foxy Brown). Eve was the first woman signed to the Ruff Ryders label, and like her label-mate DMX, appeared on other tracks before putting out her on album. Eve contributed the song "What Y'all Want" to the Ruff Ryders collaborative album Ryde or Die, Vol. 1 and was on Blackstreet's "Girlfriend/Boyfriend."
• The video plays to the lines:
  
  Pull my ice for the bail, spending nights in jail
  Drawing hearts on the wall with our names around the cell
  
  We see Eve going to a pawn shop to post bail for her sweetie. When he gets out, he does the right thing, treating her to a candle-light dinner.
• Eve was robbed at gunpoint during the video shoot, which took place in the Long Island City section of New York City. Thieves made off with three pieces of her jewelry that she valued at $127,000.