{"id":958,"date":"2016-11-05T20:45:00","date_gmt":"2016-11-05T20:45:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/abandonedcouches.com\/?p=958"},"modified":"2026-06-27T20:47:01","modified_gmt":"2026-06-27T20:47:01","slug":"rooney","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/abandonedcouches.com\/?p=958","title":{"rendered":"Rooney"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

June 2004, Culture Room, Fort Lauderdale, Fla.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Sometimes an album hits you in a certain way, captures you even though it may not be something you would normally gravitate to. My daughter listens to the Katy Perry and Taylor Swift music of the world, and I\u2019ll admit to singing along to some of their songs. I have, and always will, be a sucker for pop music.<\/p>\n

Rooney was an OC band, one of those too-cool-for-school, California bands you would hear on that vapid television show (the fact that some of the people from it are still popular is beyond me). But I heard \u201cBlueside\u201d in passing, and loved it right away. When I got hold of the album, which I read later was forged through much struggle, I took right to it. It shared a musical sensibility with some of the bands of the day \u2014 Grandaddy, The Donnas, OK-Go \u2014 but was a bit more mainstream than the others.<\/p>\n

The lead singer, Robert Schwartzman, was part of a family considered Hollywood royalty. His mother is Talia Shire (of Godfather and Rocky fame), his uncle is Francis Ford Coppola and his cousins include Nicolas Cage, Sofia Coppola and Roman Coppola. His brother Jason was the former drummer of Phantom Planet. There seemed little doubt the band was going to be huge.<\/p>\n

And touring through the country on that first album, the band had its day in the sun. I saw them at the Culture Room, where I would also see Snow Patrol, The Sounds, Something Corporate, and they were fun and lively and maybe a little frayed. At this point, playing the same 11 or 12 sings, you could tell the band was ready to move on to new material. Schwartzman even made mention of a new album in the works that could be out soon (it would not come until 2007, the band was never to find the same popularity again).<\/p>\n

But hearing those songs \u2014 \u201cLosing All Control,\u201d \u201cPopstars,\u201d \u201cBlueside,\u201d \u201cIf It Were Up To Me\u201d and the breakout hit \u201cI\u2019m Shakin\u2019 \u201d \u2014 the band clearly had something. Here\u2019s my thought about bands like Rooney: I know they wish to mount a huge career built from the successful start, but when it doesn\u2019t happen, I hope they don\u2019t think it\u2019s all for naught. Making one album, hell one song, that brings happiness is achievement enough. Years ago I talked to Ned Brower, the band\u2019s drummer, who was promoting the band\u2019s album Eureka, which it released itself in 2011. He had to say this:<\/p>\n

\u201cWe made plenty of mistakes we try and learn from them the thing that\u2019s really hard is to make sure you have a good team around you. You really have to be self-reliant. At the end of the day people only care as much as you do about all this stuff and the details. You know we\u2019ve been with these huge companies that have this huge overhead, but none of that matters.\u201d<\/p>\n

The music is what matters, I\u2019m happy to know they know that.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

June 2004, Culture Room, Fort Lauderdale, Fla. Sometimes an album hits you in a certain way, captures you even though it may not be something you would normally gravitate to. My daughter listens to the Katy Perry and Taylor Swift music of the world, and I\u2019ll admit to singing along to some of their songs. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":959,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[165],"class_list":["post-958","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-concerts","tag-rooney"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/abandonedcouches.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/958","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/abandonedcouches.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/abandonedcouches.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abandonedcouches.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abandonedcouches.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=958"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/abandonedcouches.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/958\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":960,"href":"https:\/\/abandonedcouches.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/958\/revisions\/960"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abandonedcouches.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/959"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/abandonedcouches.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=958"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abandonedcouches.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=958"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abandonedcouches.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=958"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}