LFO land in the spotlight

Rich Cronin and his LFO bandmates are in the showbiz loop. Rich just broke up with screen princess Jennifer Love Hewitt and his brother manages "Making The Band's" O-Town. LFO is just one of the many pop acts that have recently parted company with boyband svengali Lou Pearlman. The group now calls J Records, run by music icon Clive Davis, home. With a new album, "Life Is Good," LFO hopes to further ingrain themselves in the entertainment world.

As a major writing force behind "Life," Rich was extremely happy to have eight months to work on the album, compared to the one month allotted for the group's debut effort that spawned the hit singles "Girl On TV" and "Summer Girls".

"Mainly you just have time to really make the songs exactly what you want them to be and there's no real rush," Rich says from a New York hotel room. "We definitely want to raise the bar on this album. We want to change people's mind about us and maybe people that have pigeon holed us as a boy group, maybe they'll see we're a little deeper than that."

But that doesn't mean that Rich has anything against boybands. He says the O-Town boys are "really talented," although he has had some issues with Pearlman, the man behind *Nsync, Backstreet Boys and O-Town. Like those acts, LFO eventually left Pearlman's management company. Rich won't say much about Pearlman, except that he "just wants too much," (other boybands who left Pearlman's management have accused him of taking too much of their earnings).

Rich scoffs at other music acts that poke fun at O-Town because of their on-camera roots on ABC's "Making The Band".

"Anyone who says they don't like them and that they're fake, you really can't say that because they're just as good as anyone else," he says. "Who wouldn't want to be on TV? That's jealousy."

It's possible that Rich is no stranger to jealousy. His semi-recent break-up from Jennifer Love sounds as though it's still fresh in his mind and dozens of tabloid reports that linked the actress to everyone from a Broadway actor to Alec Baldwin (all while she and Rich were still together), could have made anyone jealous.

"All the rumours and the tabloids," he sighs, "all the stuff that was ever written about her really did take its toll on me as a person and definitely on our relationship."

Is it hard to ignore all the rumours?

"It certainly is," Rich says.

But don't feel too sorry for Rich. He and his LFO bandmates, Devin and Brad, are proud of the new album and hope to begin touring in the fall, preferably serenading huge crowds who love their new music.