This Is Me...Now

When Jennifer Lopez went back into the studio to make what would become *This Is Me...Now*—the follow-up to her 2002 album that was inspired, in part, by her then-new romance with Ben Affleck—she went back to the original source material: a collection of love letters that he had held on to after they broke up and given to her after they reconciled nearly two decades later. “He\'s a writer, so he writes long, beautiful, poetic letters,” Lopez tells Apple Music\'s Zane Lowe. “I brought them in there, and that really set the tone for everybody \[working on the album\] to understand what the mission was. We\'re going to \[capture\] this feeling of this journey, and what I\'ve learned about love, which I\'ve been searching for my whole life. What is it? What does it mean? Does it exist? We all get sold this bill of goods, like these magical things don\'t exist in life, and they do. Magic is out there.” That’s not to say *This Is Me...Now* is all loving affirmations and “happy, sunshiny hearts and flowers,” as she puts it—like “Can’t Get Enough,” the album’s flirtatious first single—and fond looks back at the past. “Broken Like Me,” which was inspired by the dissolution of their relationship back in 2004, was particularly difficult for Affleck to hear while she was recording it. In the years they spent apart, Lopez and Affleck found love again, started families, weathered painful breakups, and worked on themselves before they found each other again in different seasons of their lives. “The whole story has to do with how you get there, and the difficult, really challenging things we have to go through as people to understand ourselves, and to get to a place where we can do the thing that human beings are meant to do in this life, which is love,” she says. “That\'s the big mission; that\'s the goal. You get to the end of your life, you go, ‘I love somebody, and they loved me, too.’”

With throwback beats and baroque pop embellishments, J. Lo’s first solo album in 10 years chronicles a real-life fairy tale that threatens to overpower the music.

Beyond the rocks that she’s got, there isn’t much to be gleaned from the pop superstar’s album about her romance with Ben Affleck

The singer is back in business – and so, in some detail, is her storied relationship with Ben Affleck, on her first album in a decade

Jennifer Lopez's ‘This Is Me…Now’ is one of the singer’s most personal and consistent efforts but falls short of its predecessor.

The biggest weak spot of Jennifer Lopez's 'This Is Me…Now' is that almost every song hammers home the same theme: Lopez is in love with Ben Affleck again.

The star delivers a competent but underpowered album of slick pop inspired by Ben Affleck – though we could have done without his rapping

Mega-star opus to being loved-up doesn't consistently achieve lift-off. Review by Thomas H Green.