69 Love Songs is the sixth studio album by American indie pop band the Magnetic Fields, released on September 14, 1999, by Merge Records.

Stephin Merritt was sitting in a gay piano bar in Manhattan, listening to the pianist's interpretations of Stephen Sondheim songs, when he decided he ought to get into theatre music because he felt he had an aptitude for it.

The album was initially released in the United States by Merge on September 7, 1999, as a box set with Merritt interview booklet with Daniel Handler, and as three separate individual volumes—catalogue numbers MRG166 (Vol.

At Metacritic, which assigns a normalized rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, the album received an average score of 88, indicating "universal acclaim".

[6] Betty Clarke of The Guardian hailed it as "an album of such tenderness, humour and bloody-minded diversity, it'll have you throwing away your preconceptions and wondering how you ever survived a broken heart without it.

[15] Nick Mirov of Pitchfork wrote that Merritt "has proven himself as an exceptional songwriter, making quantum leaps in quality as well as quantity on 69 Love Songs.

"[12] Robert Christgau, writing in The Village Voice, stated that despite his personal dislike of cynicism and reluctance to "link it to creative exuberance", the album's "cavalcade of witty ditties—one-dimensional by design, intellectual when it feels like it, addicted to cheap rhymes, cheaper tunes, and token arrangements, sung by nonentities whose vocal disabilities keep their fondness for pop theoretical—upends my preconceptions the way high art's sposed to.

[22] In 2024, Mark Beaumont stated that 69 Love Songs "will remain underrated until it's consistently mentioned in the same breaths as Pet Sounds and the White Album.

[24] LD Beghtol's explication of 69 Love Songs (ISBN 0-8264-1925-9) was released on December 15, 2006, by Continuum International Publishing Group as part of their 33+1⁄3 series of books on influential pop/rock albums.

[25] The book includes studio anecdotes, an extensive annotated lexicon of words and phrases culled from the album's lyrics, performance notes from the band, fans, and friends, full-album shows in New York, Boston, and London, rare and unpublished images by chickfactor editor/photographer Gail O'Hara, and other items such as a crossword puzzle created by TMF/Flare associate Jon DeRosa and a scathing list of academic cant words not otherwise used in Beghtol's book.