Jennifer Lopez is in her busy era with her latest album, This Is Me … Now, and an Amazon Original.
“Of all the albums I’ve ever made, I feel like this one is really ready for the stage because of the Amazon Original that I did with it,” Lopez, 54, said during a Friday, February 16, appearance on The Tonight Show With Jimmy Fallon. “It’s ready. All the choreography, everything’s ready to go.”
This Is Me … Now, both the album and the visual, dropped on Friday. “I’m exhausted, but I’m also very excited,” she revealed about her two projects, which were inspired by her romance with husband Ben Affleck. “I’ve been working on this for two years, so it’s a big deal for me and the whole team. So we’re all, like, over the moon.”
She confessed that completing both the album and film was a real labor of love for her.
“This project took so much out of me,” Lopez told Fallon, 49. “You know, you are so obsessed with something and you can’t stop, it’s just like every detail and everything. It’s just draining, and you’re like, ‘This is it. This is my last hurrah. I’m done!’”
While the star hasn’t said she’s officially retiring from music, this is her first album in a decade, and she says it surprisingly ended up being a sequel in a way to her third studio album, This Is Me … Then. The musician, however, said she had no idea back then that she’d end up having another album that would make things full circle.
“I didn’t even realize, like, it was capturing a moment in time, you know, where I kind of, like, fell in love for the first time in that way and, like, wrote this whole album and it’s very that thing,” she said. “And I was like, ‘Oh, I’ll call it This Is Me … Then.’ And then, you know, as fate would have it, 20 years later, here we are and I’m like — I felt inspired in the same way that I did when I made that first record and I was like, ‘I’m going to make This Is Me … Now.’ I hadn’t made an album like that in 10 years.”
Lopez and Affleck, 51, famously met on the set of Gigli in early 2002. By the end of that year, he had popped the question. The couple were set to walk down the aisle in September 2003, but they ended up canceling the wedding at the last minute due to “excessive media attention.” At the start of 2004, the two announced their breakup.
Nearly two decades later, in May 2021, a source revealed to Us Weekly that the two had rekindled their romance. In July 2022, they made things official and got married in Las Vegas.
Days after their second wedding anniversary, Lopez will play Vegas’ T-Mobile Arena as she takes her new music on the road on her This Is Me … Now World Tour, which is set to begin in June. Tickets for Lopez’s shows go on sale Friday, February 23.
