69 Love Songs Ranked From Worst to Best

“I took a pen in my own hand and wrote you a hundred tunes.” 

When Stephen Merritt set out to write an album, he originally wanted it to have 100 songs. Finding that too arduous, he settled with 69, a nebulous, perhaps meaningless number. The work quickly became The Magnetic Field’s most popular album: 69 Love Songs (1999). To describe it, Merrit has been quoted in an interview by The Independent as saying, “69 Love Songs is not an album about love. It’s an album about love songs…” The distinction is small, but it gives the album a sharp, pointed edge that decentralizes a single perspective into many. This, to me, is what makes the album so compelling. The songs range from comical to beautiful, longing to dismissive, and plain unlistenable to simply amazing. Here’s my ranking with interspersed commentary:

69. Punk Love

The joke of this song is that punk music can be repetitive and annoying. It achieves that end, at the cost of being repetitive and annoying itself.

68 Love Is Like Jazz

This is a well executed joke track. But, as a joke track, it doesn’t really lend to frequent listening. It’s good for a laugh.

67. Roses

This track provides four funny lines but is hardly a song. On top of that, the vocals aren’t very pleasant on their own.

66. Very Funny

65. My Only Friend

64. I Shatter

This track has a science-fiction feel to it, but the vocal filter is almost unlistenable. That being said, I adore the lyric, “Some fall in love/ I shatter.” 

63 Bitter Tear

62. Two Kinds of People

This track has a great set of lyrics, but I don’t care for the vocal filter applied to Merritt’s voice

61. The Way You Say Good-Night

60. My Sentimental Melody

59. Time Enough For Rocking When We’re Old

58. For We Are the King of the Boudoir

The lyrics of this song are quite funny, “One tryst” with the narrator and you’ll be “spinning like a gyroscope,” but unfortunately, the instrumentation isn’t very pleasant.

57. Boa Constrictor

56. Wi’ Nae Wee Bairn Ye’ll Me Beget

55. Nothing Matters When We’re Dancing

I enjoy this track’s portrait of two dancing lovers, but I find the instrumental to be a little underwhelming.

54. Asleep and Dreaming

53. Busby Berkeley Dreams

52. Reno Dakota

Auto-biographical track about unrequited love. Interestingly, in The Magnetic Fields documentary, the real Reno Dakota is interviewed about why he turned Stephen Merritt down.

51. Kiss Me Like You Mean It

50. Blue You

49. Parades Go By

48. The Things We Did and Didn’t Do

This track makes a simple, though well received point about the ways in which a failed relationship can be characterized.

47. I’m Sorry I Love You

46. Love in the Shadows

45. If You Don’t Cry

For this track, it’s mostly the instrumental which holds it back. I do love the ultimate question at the heart of this song: can love be true without any tears?

44. You’re My Only Home

43. Acoustic Guitar

42. All My Little Words

41. Yeah! Oh, Yeah!

Call and response track that slowly unravels into a bleakly humorous, mildly depressing spousal ‘dispute.’

40. Absolutely Cuckoo

39. No One Will Ever Love You

38. Xylophone Track

Although I enjoy this track, it has a clanging instrumental which isn’t easy on the ears. I find its silver lining is ultimately Merritt’s deep bass voice, which sells its macabre lyrics, “I’ve done so much crying/ The flesh has left my bones/ I can play my ribcage/ Like a xylophone.”

37. Let’s Pretend We’re Bunny Rabbits

36. The Cactus Where Your Heart Should Be

This is an eerie track that compares a toxic love to being pricked by a cactus. I love the sputtering, dark instrumental.

35. Queen of the Savages

34. I Don’t Believe in the Sun

33.The One You Really Love

32. Sweet-Lovin’ Man

This track takes a surprisingly sweet, though ridiculous, lyrical dive into just how valuable a certain kind of man’s love can be.

31. Fido Your Leash Is Too Long

30. Come Back From San Francisco

29. It’s a Crime

28. Promises of Eternity

This track features an actor desperately trying to retain their lover. The third verse is sung in a hilariously whiny fashion by Merritt, comparing their potential breakup to the dismantlement of theater.

27. World Love

26. Experimental Love Music

This is the first true joke track of the album. It’s conceptually funny while also avoiding the cynicism present in “Love is Like Jazz” and “Punk Love.”

25. The Sun Goes Down and the World Goes Dancing

24. A Pretty Girl Is Like

This track features some of Merritt’s most sardonic writing. The lyrics are all perverted and bizarre metaphors for what a pretty girl might be like. The song teeters on the edge of a fine line, and I can’t say if it crosses it or not.

23. Strange Eyes

22. How Fucking Romantic

This teeters on being a “joke” track, but the vocal performance is spoken with such conviction that, in only a couple lines, a convincing character portrait is made.

21. The Night You Can’t Remember

20. A Chicken With Its Head Cut Off

This track is a semi-humorous take on a country song. There’s a degree of mocking in it, but the refrain also feels sweetly sincere. My favorite lyrics are, “We don’t have to be stars exploding in the night/ Or electric eels under the covers/ We don’t have to be anything quite so unreal/ Lets just be lovers.”

19. Meaningless

18. Zebra

More ridiculous “in-character” songwriting. Again, Merritt crafts another extremely tangible character in the course of a single song.

17. Underwear

This track is dark and droning with lyrics that question if there is anything better than a scantily-clad boy or girl. I love the overall sound of this one, especially how Merritt’s vocals melt into the buzzing instrumental.

16. Long-Forgotten Fairytale

15. I Can’t Touch You Anymore

14.Washington, D.C.

13. Grand Canyon

Poignant, heartbreaking lyrics.

12. How to Say Goodbye

11. I Think I Need a New Heart

10. (Crazy for You But) Not That Crazy

This is a humorous track with a great instrumental. Its lyrics recount ridiculous acts done by the narrator for their love. Altogether, they point to a comical, unimaginable (nearly Lovecraftian) act that is finally too crazy to be fulfilled.

9. When My Boy Walks Down the Street 

This instrumental feels scuffed in the best possible way. The lyrics are an excellent example of the way gender and sexuality blur over the course of the album. Merritt himself is gay, but many of the songs are sung by women, or other men, and their subjects portray either, lending to a kaleidoscopic perspective.

8. Epitaph for My Heart

A lovely, lush guitar instrumental under Merritt’s bass vocals. I love the self-reflective lines, “Who will mourn the passing of my heart/ Will its little droppings climb the pop chart.”

7. The Luckiest Guy on the Lower East Side 

Merritt’s witty writing is sung on this track by Dudley Klute (one of 69 Love Songs many collaborators). Klute delivers a shockingly long vocal at the end that ties the entire track together.

6. Abigail, Belle of Kilronan

As an avid fan of The Magnetic Fields, I found myself wondering when the ‘joke’ or darkly humorous twist of this song would happen, but it never comes. Instead, the song is a beautiful parting from a soldier to his love.

5. The Book of Love

A song that imagines a “Book of Love” and its contents.

4. Love is Like a Bottle of Gin

Some of the album’s most sincere and beautiful lyrics over top of sturdy guitar chords.

3. Papa Was a Rodeo

This song follows a transient narrator who never even stuck around long enough for a one night stand.

2. The Death of Ferdinand de Saussure

The Swiss linguist is confounded by love and then killed. His (fictional) dying words making up the chorus, underscored by some of the album’s best instrumentation.

1. I Don’t Want to Get Over You

This is the anti-moving on song about a past lover just not worth getting over. 

Overall, I highly recommend this album to anyone interested. Even its worst songs are punctuated with small, entertaining moments that make a whole listen worthwhile. And what better way to get into the Valentine’s spirit than to hunker down and take on a three-hour behemoth of a record about the relationships of others. While not a Valentine’s Day album, 69 Love Songs undertakes the task of interrogating the very idea of a love song—the many different ways in which they manifest, the range of emotions they present, and how love can be the most or even least significant parts of our lives.