Rich Cronin, lead singer and songwriter for LFO: ‘Before you knew it’ the band was ‘finished’

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Rich Cronin, frontman for LFO, expressed one regret about writing “Summer Girls,” the 1999 hip-hop pop hit unofficially known as the Abercrombie & Fitch song. Had he known it was destined to be one of the soundtracks of the summer of 1999, the songwriter would have tweaked the catchy chorus.

“I would have definitely taken out the line about Chinese food [making him sick] if I had known that,” Cronin said in the Boston Globe in 2005, the year he was diagnosed with leukemia. He died Wednesday at 36.

After LFO broke up in 2002, Cronin eventually found himself back in his hometown of Kingston, Mass., and turned to Match.com in 2008 to kick-start his social life. His online pitch, printed that year in the Boston Herald, was forthright and bittersweet:

“I have always loved music and was fortunate enough to see [my dreams] come true by the time I was 24. I was the lead singer of a group called LFO and we sold over 4 million albums, toured the world, were all over MTV and any other show you can imagine, then before you knew it, we were finished.”

-- Valerie J. Nelson