Singer and actress Jennifer Lopez is opening up about what inspired her to return to the recording studio.
In an interview with Entertainment Tonight about her new cinematic original This Is Me... Now: A Love Story, Lopez credited her husband, Ben Affleck, for her decision to make new music.
"When Ben and I got back together, it was just like, 'I want to make music again, I want to get back in the studio,'" Lopez told the publication. "I was very, very inspired."
Even though her rekindled relationship and eventual marriage to Affleck was inspiring, Lopez still had some doubts about her new musical project.
"Half the time, I was thinking, like, 'This is amazing! I am so excited that I'm doing this!'" she explained. "And then half time I was like, 'Why are you doing this? You are so crazy."
Lopez went on to say that she believes that mix of excitement and self-doubt is "what being an artist is about."
"You know, you have to," she added. "That's the difference between being an artist and not being an artist, how vulnerable you can get."
In addition in inspiring and motivating her to get back into the recording studio, Lopez says her husband helped her ignore her doubts and remain focused on her overall musical goal.
“I was like, ‘I don’t write, I don’t do this,'" Lopez said during a press conference with director Dave Meyers, People reports. "(Ben) was like, ‘You do, you write, you direct, you produce, you choreograph, you do all the things. Start stepping into that, start owning a little bit of who you are."
Lopez and Affleck dated for the first time in 2002 and eventually got engaged for the first time that same year. They postponed their wedding in 2003 before officially announcing their split in January, 2004.
They later rekindled their relationship in 2021 before getting married in July, 2022.
Affleck also makes a cameo appearance in Lope'z latest visual project. Meyers, the director, said in the same press conference that the married couple's relationship timeline was a major influence, " specifically the pain that she went through when she broke up with Ben the first time."
"There was a lot of honesty that was shared in that first meeting, and so the heart factory became sort of a Titanic-level meltdown," Meyers added, "which was a metaphor for what she was giving me as far as her truth."
