Jennifer Lopez is set to release her ninth studio album and Amazon special. Photo / Norman Jean Roy
Jennifer Lopez is set to release her ninth studio album and Amazon special. Photo / Norman Jean Roy
In November 2002, 33-year-old Jennifer Lopez released her third studio album, This is Me... Then. An album grounded in the emotion of her budding relationship with Hollywood’s golden boy of the era, Ben Affleck.
The album, which included her hit song Jenny From the Block, was a soulful picture of honesty, femininity, vulnerability, a glimpse of a formidable force and a precursor to the heartbreak in the years that followed
The Good Will Hunting star served as her main inspiration for the hit record, which the singer in turn dedicated to him. Fifteen months later the pair known by fans as “Bennifer” called off their engagement, shocking fans and media alike.
Eight studio albums, 65 singles, four marriages, two babies, a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, and a now infamous love story and reconciliation later, 54-year-old Lopez has one hell of a story to tell.
And she’s set to do just that with the release of her ninth studio album, This Is Me... Now and a Prime Video original, This is Me... Now: A Love Story.
In anticipation of the release, Lopez sits down with the Herald’s Jenni Mortimer as part of a roundtable to talk Bennifer 2.0, her Kiwi connection and who she is... now.
“I look at that time and it was such kind of an innocent album,” the singer shares of the creation of her third studio album.
“My voice sounded more innocent,” Lopez recalls, “falling in love in that way for the first time with the love of my life,” she adds, reminiscing on her and Affleck’s first 2002 romance.
And while she became famously known as “Jenny from The Block” from that album, she admits her new album is about a whole new Jenny.
“What I realised is, This is Me... Now is, you know, that time was kind of me becoming who I always wanted to be.”
Lopez unapologetically dives into that becoming in her latest project with Amazon, which she refers to as a “musical experience” - an hour-long feature that feels like a music video in mini movie form with a peek inside the singer’s diary.
The special deep dives into the challenges Lopez faced in finding her happily ever after with now-husband Affleck and the criticism she faced in following her heart.
Lopez admits she was left with more questions than answers in her quest to find out, “Does real love exist, is forever real, does anything last forever?”
Lopez is set to release the special in conjunction with the new album. Photo / Norman Jean Roy
“I lived as a hopeless romantic with those questions and my life was just like, ‘oh, what is, what is it?’, she shares on the other paths she found her heart taking.
However, Lopez believes her reconciliation with Affleck gave her those answers she had long yearned for.
“I felt like, ‘Oh, wait, some things do last forever. True love does exist. Oh, holy s***.”
And one very special Kiwi helped her tell that love story via dance in the special - Kiwi choreographer to the stars Parris Goebel, who helped Lopez pull it all together.
The singer shares that from the moment she first spotted Goebel when she was just a teen, she knew there was something special about her, and that became the catalyst for their “very long relationship.”
“I don’t know if people know this but Parris, I saw her on the internet, doing a small little piece years and years ago, she was about 18 or 19 years old and I brought her to the United States for the first time to come and choreograph for a tour,” recalls the hitmaker.
“I was doing the Dance Again tour and she did a little piece for us there. She did a couple of numbers for that tour and it was so much fun and it started our relationship. We’ve worked together many times over the years and she’s blossomed and grown into one of the most incredible choreographers that we have right now.”
The special is a personal deep dive into the singers 21-year journey. Photo / Amazon Prime Video
So when Lopez decided on doing the special, she knew Goebel was one phone call she had to make.
“When I started this project, I called her and I said, ‘Listen, I’m doing this thing. That’s something I’ve never done before. I don’t even know what to call it, but this is what I want to do’.”
According to Lopez, Goebel was immediately on board with the concept and the pair clicked in the vision.
“I told her the story and I played her some of the records and she was like, ‘Okay, I get it. I see it’ and she wound up doing a few of the numbers in it for me.”
So with that special due to be seen by the masses and no doubt used as the visual soundtrack for many parties to come, what does the singer hope people take away from it?
According to Lopez, it’s the same message that she had to learn over the years.
“It’s about accepting yourself too, embracing who you are now with all of the things that have happened to you over time and that evolution never stops. Who you are now in the moment is somebody you should embrace no matter what.”
And in the essence of embracing the evolution, Lopez says she had to do her own work to get there, admitting that she had been “really hurt” and “really angry” about some of the things she had been through.
Lopez in part credits husband Affleck for the healing that it took to get her to the place where she felt ready to share that hurt.
“I credit this a bit to Ben because he helped me feel that it was okay and that I was safe and that I was loved and that I could look at those parts of myself that I wasn’t so proud of, of things that I had gone through and accept them.”
The special takes a look back Jennifer Lopez's love story with herself and Ben Affleck. Photo / Norman Jean Roy
That learning became the premise of the special, making it more than just a conventional love story, and instead about the love story we have with ourselves - something we all can relate to, even without the Hollywood happy ending.
“This is Me... Now is very much about embracing yourself at each moment, at each point in your life and loving and forgiving yourself in each of those moments and going, ‘this is who I am right now,’” she shares.
“And you know what, I love this person today - exactly where I am. And that doesn’t mean I’m perfect. That doesn’t mean I do everything right. That doesn’t mean that I have it all figured out - quite to the contrary.
“But I still appreciate and love myself and I’m grateful for who I am and how I’ve gotten here.”
This is Me... Now: A Love Story is available on Amazon Prime Video on February 16.
Jenni Mortimer is the New Zealand Herald’s lifestyle and travel audience editor. Jenni started at the Herald in 2017 and previously worked as an education publication editor. She’s also the host of The Herald’s parenting podcast One Day You’ll Thank Me, mother to a 4-year-old son and believes Michael Scott is the greatest motivator of her generation.
