JLo returns with “This is Me…. Now”.
Paris, Feb 16 (EFE).- By Nerea González
After a decade without a new album, Jennifer Lopez returns with “This is Me…. Now,” a sequel to the almost eponymous album she composed 20 years ago when she fell in love with the actor Ben Affleck.
Having a “second chance” with that love, she said in an interview with EFE, inspired her to return to the studio.
“I wrote the ‘This Is Me… Then'” 20 years ago, when I fell in love with the love of my life of that time and we ended up breaking up,” explains the Bronx, superstar born in New York of Puerto Rican descent.
“But 20 years later, we reunited and I felt very inspired to go back in and write again about the experience of having a second chance at this kind of love,” she added.
The album ‘This is Me… Now’, which will be released on Friday along with a movie written and starring the singer herself with cameos by Affleck, Sofia Vergara, Post Malone, and Trevor Noah, among others, Lopez describes it as “the most personal project I’ve ever done.”
The album “is a big old love story,” she admitted, with songs like “Dear Ben pt.II” and “Greatest Love Story Never Told.” But it’s also much more than that.
“The whole idea about ‘This is Me… Now’ is embracing yourself, like embracing who you are right now, cause I think sometimes we look back at ourselves and we go ‘I could’ve done this but I could’ve done that better’ but in that moment maybe you were doing the best you could with what you knew,” she said.
“This is who I am, I’ve picked up some scars along the way, there are some amazing things about me too, but I love this person, I embrace who I am, this is me now,” the 54-year-old singer added.
“I have shown a part of my soul and showed a part of myself that I’ve never shown before.”
With the single “Can’t Get Enough” as its cover letter, the album is also an opportunity for the superstar to tell her story on her terms, without tabloids or “paparazzi” filters.
“My intention was to share what I’ve learned, and to share a story that I think is worldwide, that has something to say, and hopefully it will entertain people, inspire people, and comfort people.”
This process makes her fans accomplices in the sweet moments she’s going through. It’s part of her “responsibility as an artist.”
Even after two months in the studio, when she was done with the music, she felt there were still things to tell.
“It was a beautiful expression of the idea that true love exists, and that forever is something that is real, and that was captured on the album but there was also another part of the story that needed to be told about the journey that it took to get there.”
That’s how the idea of making the movie ‘This Is Me… Now: A Love Story’, directed by Dave Meyers and also available from Friday on Amazon Prime. It is an extension of the album that adds the cinematic side of Lopez’s career.
Although it is not a biopic, the singer defines the production as very “meta,” with autobiographical aspects and inspirations. “Is the story of hopeless romantic, which is very much me,” she acknowledged.
Putting into the “This Is Me… Now” universe so many things that involve her personally (the music, the movies, the love, her path of growing up) was a very enriching process that she had never attempted before. But it also, she laughingly admits, absorbed all her energies.
“It was so hard but it was worth every minute of it,” she said.
“I miss the fans, I love people, so I’m excited to get back out there and jump and dance, and sing and cry, and scream and laugh with them,” she promised. EFE
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