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.
