“All songs are about love.” This was the blanket generalisation I was faced with over Christmas after another rant about the uniformity of Adele’s sentimental balladry. Perched high upon my dubious elitist pedestal, I delivered a suitably blunt and derisive response; surely it was more than a bit reductive to suggest that an entire art form could be centred upon one emotion. My taste, of course, was far more wide-ranging, my mind broadened by the work of boundary-pushing songwriters who would never be discovered in a rut of churning out love songs. Comfortably smug though I was, there remained a niggling doubt that my assurance was misguided.

A cursory glance at the current top 40 would certainly seem to prove me wrong, as far as pop music is concerned: the mechanical hit-makers continue to stick to the twin formula of amours in da club and insipid ballads designed to fill empty ice-cream tubs with tears. The homogeneity of this subject matter is terrifying, but then pop music is practically about being pristinely formulaic; there’s a reason the phrase “the perfect pop song” has gained currency.

It’s not worth getting too caught up in decrying the stagnant pit that is pop songwriting, though: it’s clear that, in spite of my misgivings, something in this formula works. As much as I’d like ferociously to deny that all songs are about love, it is certainly a unifying aspect of much music, an emotion that taps into something universal that we respond to. The ubiquity of the love song in all its forms has arisen because it is a surefire way to achieve mass appeal; whether it be because we want to imagine the shared pain of a break-up or to pretend that the songs are about us, our appetite for them is voracious.

This isn’t just true of mainstream pop music, though – and here’s where my pedestal starts to look a little bit more precarious. The archetypal singer-songwriter draws from the same inspiration in the form of confessional heartache; an album I’ve been enjoying recently, Sharon Van Etten’s Tramp, is resolutely a break-up record.

Indeed, as I frantically scoured my music collection for evidence of its multitude of different themes and genres, my hypocrisy began to make itself clearer. Even the output of my treasured miserablists Arab Strap could probably be summarised by these immortal lines from ‘Glue’: “Sex without love is a good ride worth trying, / But love without sex is second only to dying.”

Ironically, the best solution to this predicament is perhaps to be found in The Magnetic Fields’ seminal 69 Love Songs. I turned to it as I began to feel like the narrator of its song ‘Busby Berkley Dreams’: “I should have forgotten you long ago, / But you’re in every song I know.” As the kind of cynic for whom the concept of romance conjures up little more than a reserve of bile, I refused to listen to a three-disk epic comprised entirely of love songs for a very long time.

What a mistake that was. Stephin Merritt, the songwriting genius behind The Magnetic Fields, has accurately described the record as containing 69 songs about love songs, not love. Its dizzying array of genres and rotating cast of singers mean it is an amorphous monster of a thing; it seems at once to encompass all possible experiences of love and to ridicule the possibility of ever doing such a thing accurately. From throwaway genre exercises like ‘Love is Like Jazz’ to parodic duets like ‘Yeah! Oh, Yeah!’ 69 Love Songs works as a deconstruction of this most universal of themes, laughing at its all-pervasive presence while contributing to it.

Of course, it’s also a lot more than that: genuinely affecting songs like ‘When My Boy Walks Down the Street’ and the fragile, devastating ‘Asleep and Dreaming’ prove that there is still profundity to be found in the love song format.

This, then, is the solace that The Magnetic Fields provide: they find ways of generating new perspectives on the love song tradition by neither embracing it nor succumbing fully to parody. Their attitude is perhaps the most productive one to adopt in light of this oversaturation; love songs may be the source of much saccharine-induced vomit, but as 69 Love Songs attests, they are an inextricable part of modern music.