Did you hear about the two Hollywood megastars who got engaged, broke up in the shadow of a notorious workplace accident, and then, 20 years and several partners later, finally got hitched? If you somehow missed it, Jennifer Lopez is going to tell you in detail. This Is Me…Now, her first solo album in 10 years, is a coda to 2002’s This Is Me…Then, her third most commercially successful album. Lopez co-wrote and released that record amid the first iteration of her high-profile relationship with handsome Bostonian Ben Affleck. This Is Me…Now is the culmination of Bennifer, the sequel, irresistible to tabloids and hopeless romantics, maybe in that order. “When I was a girl they’d ask me what I’d be/A woman in love is what I grew up wantin’ to be,” Lopez sings, rather depressingly, on the title track.
The album, and its accompanying $20 million movie, unfolds like one of J.Lo’s romcoms: Two former lovers, adrift, spend years searching for the right person, before reuniting with the wisdom of age and experience. The movie loosely follows the Taíno legend of Alida, the daughter of a Taíno chief who falls in forbidden love with Taroo, a Carib boy, on the eve of her arranged marriage; the god Yukiyú turns them into a red flower and a hummingbird, respectively. (The light pop joint “Hummingbird” bisects the album, though it doesn’t quite engage the mythology enough to be readily meaningful.) J.Lo is lovestruck as fuck, this album posits, though it is self-aware about its melodrama. “Mad in Love,” a mid-tempo R&B track, opens with a flute and string section out of a 1950s romance, nodding to This Is Me…Now’s Hollywood love story. Otherworldly harps, celestas, and violins weave through beats and production of a mid-2000s vintage, supplying a baroque quality that embellishes J.Lo’s own lovelorn legend.
Across eight previous studio albums, a cache of hits like 2001’s “I’m Real” and 2011’s “On the Floor,” a Super Bowl performance and a presidential inauguration, J.Lo’s voice is notoriously serviceable, airy and light with a very specific range. A major appeal of her pop stardom is that the one-time Fly Girl is consistently dazzling on the dancefloor and, at 54, she appears athletic, taut, cool as ever. She’s advanced her music career through will and sheer charisma, of which she has gobs—we’re talking about a woman who had many of us out here wearing newsboy caps and cargo knickers in the early ’00s. She is an all-around entertainer, a fashion icon, and an often-great actor to boot. (Most will cite Hustlers, Selena, and Out of Sight; I’ll agree with J.Lo that she deserved an Oscar nod for El Cantante.) And so the thinness of the voice has often been beside the point, if not a boon to her early career—a stand-in for her Bronx regularness on tracks like “Jenny From the Block.”
