After eight years, Jennifer Lopez has a new album on the way, titled “This Is Me… Now,” which is the follow-up to 2002’s “This Is Me… Then.” And judging by her latest interview with Apple Music’s Zane Lowe, JLo makes it no secret that the new record is heavily rooted around love, life lessons, and learning to find inner happiness.
What’s particularly sentimental to Jennifer is that many of the songs featured on “This Is Me… Then” were about her now-husband Ben Affleck, who infamously called off their wedding back in 2003. During her chat with Zane, Jennifer recalled how the split left her in such a bad state that she believed she was going to die following the unexpected breakup.
NEW 📹 | Jennifer Lopez talks about her break up with Ben Affleck in a new interview for Apple Music:
“It was the biggest heartbreak of my life. I honestly felt like I was gonna die.” pic.twitter.com/UAWFohMGOl
— best of jennifer lopez (@badpostjlo) November 28, 2022
Jennifer, who considers Ben the love of her life, expressed, “Once we called off that wedding 20 years ago, I was — it was the biggest heartbreak of my life. I honestly felt like I was going to die.” For the next 18 years after the split, the “Get Right” singer said she attempted to continue navigating through life by welcoming the idea of new relationships, but “I just couldn’t get it right.” Since reconciling with Ben, however, Jennifer wholeheartedly believes they’ll remain together for a lifetime this time around.
“But now, 20 years later, it does have a happy ending. It has the most would-never-happen-in-Hollywood ending,” she continued. “’That would never happen. We’re not going to write that because nobody would believe it’ ending.”
“I was like, ‘You’re right. It was painful.’ It was a part of me then that I had to put away to move on and survive. It was a survival tactic, for sure.”
Speaking of her 2002 album, Jennifer told Zane that the songs she wrote for the project were mainly based on her romance with Ben, which makes it all the more special that she now has a follow-up record that has seen her reunite with her ex before the pair decided to officially get married.
While it’s never been disclosed what led to Ben ending the marriage, the New Yorker seems to think that she and her husband still had feelings for each other when it all came crashing down. “That was part of what destroyed us was the outside energy that was coming at us,” she added.
Jennifer Lopez talks about the story of “not.going.anywhere” from her upcoming album This Is Me… Now.pic.twitter.com/AcrjTU0nov
— best of jennifer lopez (@badpostjlo) November 28, 2022
“And we loved each other, it was hard. It felt, at times, unfair, but neither one of us is that person to be like, woe is me. So we were like, ‘Well, we just got to dust it off and keep it moving.’ And I think, in the weirdest way, that it motivated both of us to then become and do the things that we wound up doing, which is kind of go into hyper-gear.”
Jennifer has yet to announce an official release date for “This Is Me… Now.”