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"  Jennifer Lopez is sitting in an overstuffed chair in her Bel Air French-country mansion with a Black- Berry in one hand and a mug of steaming tea in the other. I&amp;#039;ve been warned that she&amp;#039;s sick. Her hair is slicked back, knotted in a bun. She&amp;#039;s wearing denim leggings, a gray hoodie sweatshirt that reads RETURN OF THE CHAMP, and a pair of holy s*#t\u2013size emerald-cut diamond earrings. (Full disclosure: I never asked if they&amp;#039;re real, but would J.Lo, who practically trademarked high-octane glamour in her barely-there Versace cocktail dresses, jewel-tone Marchesa gowns, floor-sweeping furs, and face-swallowing designer sunglasses do zirconium?) She tells me, in an all-business tone, that after our interview she&amp;#039;s headed to rehearsal (despite her sinus infection) for her upcoming performance at the American Music Awards, where she&amp;#039;ll debut the first single, &amp;quot;Louboutins,&amp;quot; off her new record, Love?, due out in early spring. Can we expect a big event? &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s going to be eventish,&amp;quot; she says, glancing toward the window where the afternoon light is pouring in. &amp;quot;My choreographer calls it a 10-layer cake.&amp;quot; (Of course, five days later, her routine turned out to be the main event at the AMAs when Lopez slipped jumping off a human pyramid and landed on her famed posterior, though she almost instantly popped up, dignity intact.) I ask if she&amp;#039;s nervous, considering it&amp;#039;s been a while since we&amp;#039;ve seen the Bronx-born Fly Girl shake it live on national television. But before she can answer, she hears Emme, her nearly two-year-old daughter, crying downstairs. &amp;quot;Oh, can you excuse me?&amp;quot; Lopez doesn&amp;#039;t wait for a reply and makes a beeline for the balcony. &amp;quot;Emme, hi! Emme, what are you doing?&amp;quot; she calls out sweetly. A few minutes later she returns, flashing a warm smile and packing a curly-haired little girl in pink pajamas on her hip like a sack of groceries. I tell her she&amp;#039;s adorable. &amp;quot;Say thank you, Emme,&amp;quot; says her mother, mindfully. We try to talk about the new record, but Emme has other plans. She keeps pretending to open the door and acts as if she might escape, sneakily, like a cat burglar from a silent movie. &amp;quot;Emme, no, you can&amp;#039;t go outside,&amp;quot; Lopez says. A few minutes later, the nanny comes in with Max, Emme&amp;#039;s twin brother, whose apple cheeks are wet with tears. Apparently Max doesn&amp;#039;t appreciate being left out. &amp;quot;Hi, papi. What happened\u2014you&amp;#039;re crying?&amp;quot; Lopez coos. &amp;quot;Emme is here, but you were sleeping. I thought you were busy.&amp;quot; Lunch is ready, and the nanny comes back in to scoop up the kids. &amp;quot;Say bye-bye,&amp;quot; Lopez encourages. &amp;quot;This is their time to nap,&amp;quot; she tells me after they leave the room. &amp;quot;They eat a little, and then they conk out.&amp;quot; When you watch Lopez with her kids, hugging them, teaching them to say their &amp;quot;pleases&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;thank-yous,&amp;quot; the tabloid-diva lore (she requested 60 bags be moved to another suite after finding out Diddy stayed there once!) is hard to swallow. In mama-bear mode, her cordial defensive coolness, found in most insanely famous people after enduring years of interviews, begins to thaw. We talk a little more about the twins&amp;#039; sleeping schedule (they snooze through the night, FYI) until Lopez realizes we&amp;#039;re off track, bowled over by the unfiltered cuteness of the Max and Emme show. We were talking about the title of the new album, I remind her. &amp;quot;Right,&amp;quot; says Lopez, now massaging her temples, eyes closed. &amp;quot;Right. Let me switch gears here for a second.&amp;quot; If you&amp;#039;ve been wondering where the hell Lopez has been the past couple of years, here&amp;#039;s your answer: switching gears. Think back to when Lopez was better known as J.Lo\u2014a New York\u2013bred dancer made good, whose around-the-way-girl charisma was selling the hell out of her R&amp;amp;amp;B-tinged dance records and knocking us over in films such as Selena and Out of Sight. She was an MTV phenomenon\u2014 an assimilated Latin triple threat whose enviable curves made the pin-thin body type look pointless. (Remember when Vanity Fair showed her in nothing but a pair of corseted panties, her back toward us?) Her very public relationships with then celebrity It Boys Sean &amp;quot;Diddy&amp;quot; Combs and Ben Affleck\u2014and the ugly breakups that followed\u2014made the Vida la Lopez narrative even more gripping. But a tumultuous personal life didn&amp;#039;t stop her from grooving on her burgeoning business empire, launching Sweetface, her fashion line, putting her name and that heart-shaped lattecolored face of hers\u2014that skin!\u2014behind a host of successful fragrances, not to mention her production company, Nuyorican. Then, well, things changed. In 2004, she settled down, quietly marrying longtime confidant and Latin recording titan Marc Anthony in a secret ceremony in her Los Angeles home. Soon after, she began working on a Spanish-language album, Como Ama una Mujer, a brooding, ballad-heavy affair coproduced by Anthony that both wowed and flummoxed fans (no trademark Jenny-fromthe- block, up-in-the-club hits to be had here). In 2007, Lopez released her sixth studio album, Brave, a bland pop effort chockablock with songs about commitment, marriage, loyalty, and domestic bliss, prompting Rolling Stone to dub her music career &amp;quot;about as edgy as her famous booty.&amp;quot; The newlyweds worked together onscreen as well, costarring in the widely panned music biopic El Cantante, about salsa giant Hector Lavoe, which Lopez produced and admits was &amp;quot;a little disjointed.&amp;quot; Several months after the film&amp;#039;s release, Lopez, six months pregnant, made the final move in dialing back her world-dominating divadom: She took some time off. Nearly two years spent doing &amp;quot;nothing. I was like a wife and a mom,&amp;quot; she says, unapologetically. &amp;quot;But you need that time to grow. You can&amp;#039;t be afraid of, Oh, I&amp;#039;m out of the public, then I&amp;#039;m going to have to make a comeback. It&amp;#039;s ridiculous. No.&amp;quot; I have to imagine someone like Lopez is acutely aware that the pop genre, once vibing off her slick, urban-light sound, has moved on and is more youth-obsessed than ever. Today&amp;#039;s iTunes divas\u2014 Lady Gaga, Rihanna, Katy Perry\u2014are weirder, wilder, and more experimental with their music and personas. Their avantgarde haircuts and couture costumes (worn on- and offstage) are meant to reinforce their badass-ness rather than their sex appeal. Question is, will a 40-year-old mother of two philosophizing on the topic of love in the guise of a dance album be met with the same enthusiasm now reserved for eccentric pop idols nearly half her age? Lopez says she&amp;#039;s not at all worried. &amp;quot;This is what I do\u2014what, because I have kids and a husband now I&amp;#039;m not supposed to be me?&amp;quot; she says with a hint of defensiveness. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m a more heightened me if anything.&amp;quot; Here she laughs, almost as if she wants to let me know it&amp;#039;s okay I posed the question. &amp;quot;Hyper J.Lo. Everything I wanted before, I want twice as much now. And that doesn&amp;#039;t mean material things; it means to explore more, to think more. Being an artist doesn&amp;#039;t start because you&amp;#039;re 21, and it doesn&amp;#039;t end because you&amp;#039;re 51. You are who you are until the day you die.&amp;quot; You&amp;#039;ll still be doing this at 51? &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;ll be doing some form of it when I&amp;#039;m 71.&amp;quot; It makes sense that Lopez would have no shortage of opinions on her album&amp;#039;s chief theme: love and how damn confusing it can be (hence the question mark). One look at her relationship track record, documented relentlessly in the press to this day, and you get the feeling she knows about female suffering. She&amp;#039;s been married twice before. Once to Ojani Noa, who at press time, Lopez was suing for attempting to release allegedly intimate film footage from their honeymoon. (When I ask how she feels about this, Lopez just shakes her head and says, &amp;quot;I just don&amp;#039;t like to give that any energy. I think he&amp;#039;s proven who he is over and over, so it&amp;#039;s not surprising.&amp;quot;) The other to Cris Judd, her former backup dancer and choreographer. And of course there were the breakups, with hip-hop impresario Diddy and ex-fianc\u00E9 Affleck (following a brief reconciliation after an eleventh-hour wedding cancellation). Lopez, who cowrote much of the new album, says she drew heavily from past experiences when penning the lyrics but won&amp;#039;t name names. &amp;quot;I would never speak about specifics in my own relationships because I think it&amp;#039;s tacky,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;If you seriously want to know, listen to the music.&amp;quot; Wynter Gordon, a 24-year-old wunderkind singer-songwriter who&amp;#039;s written tracks for Mary J. Blige and Danity Kane, worked closely with Lopez on this record. She first met Lopez on the set of her new movie, The Back-up Plan, where they sprawled out on the floor of Lopez&amp;#039;s trailer for an impromptu therapy session. &amp;quot;All I&amp;#039;d heard were stories in the tabloids,&amp;quot; Gordon says. &amp;quot;But actually sitting down with her and talking about her past relationships and failing and being left\u2014it was awesome. Even though she has Marc and the kids, it was like, still she has questions about love. Is this it? You know, because she&amp;#039;s been through it a lot. I looked at her not just as Jennifer Lopez. It was like talking to an older woman who is giving me her perspective on life.&amp;quot; The record&amp;#039;s title and inspiration might suggest maudlin results, but make no mistake: Love? is a dance album. Lopez wants you to move and be moved. The five tracks the record company played for me are infectious club-thumpers (&amp;quot;Louboutins&amp;#039; &amp;quot; ridiculously catchy beat is made for scorned women everywhere trying to shake off the blues on a girls night out) but they lack experimentation. That said, the up-tempo ballad &amp;quot;Starting Over&amp;quot; packs some meditative heft. It&amp;#039;s unquestionably an adult pop song that grapples with marriage and betrayal of vows, and when Lopez sings, &amp;quot;He&amp;#039;s my man when we&amp;#039;re at home and it can&amp;#039;t hurt if I don&amp;#039;t know/ All his secrets all his lies I just keep pushing out my mind,&amp;quot; you can actually hear heartache in the delivery. &amp;quot;This is something I haven&amp;#039;t been through once in my life. This is something I&amp;#039;ve been through a few times in my life,&amp;quot; she tells me. &amp;quot;Where you really have your eggs in one basket and that breach happens and you know you should go but you&amp;#039;re still in love and you just don&amp;#039;t know what to do. It hits you because it&amp;#039;s not like&amp;quot;\u2014 here she breaks into a mock you-go-girl rap\u2014&amp;quot;you&amp;#039;re a cheater, and a liar, and I hate you, and you&amp;#039;re no good, and I&amp;#039;m leaving. It&amp;#039;s not that. It&amp;#039;s like, I&amp;#039;m tormented. Even though you&amp;#039;ve done this and I know it, I still don&amp;#039;t know what to do. I know I should go, but I don&amp;#039;t want to. And that&amp;#039;s why it&amp;#039;s such a fucked-up thing.&amp;quot; Even if it does feel like Lopez has been lying low for a little too long not to consider her record and coinciding movie release a kind of comeback (see paragraph one, sweatshirt), it&amp;#039;s not as if we haven&amp;#039;t seen her in the news of late. Yes, there are the &amp;quot;sex tape&amp;quot; rumors (which New York magazine called &amp;quot;great news for Lopez...`sex tape&amp;#039; headlines will be great for her PR&amp;quot;). But there are more edifying reasons too. In August, Lopez and Anthony hosted a celebratory dinner for Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, inviting a small group of &amp;quot;political Latinos&amp;quot; to their home on Long Island. &amp;quot;They wanted me to give a toast or whatever, and I didn&amp;#039;t know what to say,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;Then I thought, Why are we doing this? When we watched her being sworn in, it was me, and my mom, and my sister, and Marc, and the babies sitting there, and we&amp;#039;re looking at this, and we&amp;#039;re all crying. You&amp;#039;re like, Why was I so moved? It&amp;#039;s because when somebody works hard at something and they get somewhere and they achieve their greatest dream, that&amp;#039;s inspiring. It&amp;#039;s amazing. That&amp;#039;s something like what I said.&amp;quot; What was Sotomayor like? &amp;quot;Very smart. And down-to-earth but overwhelmed, I think. She didn&amp;#039;t realize what she was going to symbolize. And it&amp;#039;s always scary to be thrown into it\u2013that&amp;#039;s what I felt like when I did Selena. You&amp;#039;re thrown out there, and all of a sudden you&amp;#039;re not anonymous. You are now known. And that&amp;#039;s a lot to handle. It&amp;#039;s scary at first. Then you get used to it. And so she was in that moment of her life where it&amp;#039;s just like, What the hell? Everybody&amp;#039;s clapping for me. People are writing about me, talking about me, I&amp;#039;m on TV. She was just a judge in New York.&amp;quot; Obviously, Lopez can relate, not only because they&amp;#039;re both successful women who&amp;#039;ve become icons in the Latin community, but because she still sees herself as an underdog\u2014just a girl from New York dancing in clubs and music videos, hoping for a break at some point, which she got in 1998&amp;#039;s Out of Sight. In the Steven Soderbergh\u2013directed romantic thriller, Lopez plays a federal marshal opposite George Clooney&amp;#039;s criminal, flooring critics and fans alike with her sultry, nuanced performance, earning her respect as a burgeoning, serious actress. Somewhere along the way, she emerged as a Nora Ephron\u2013like heroine, starring in hugely profitable popcorn chick flicks, including Maid in Manhattan, The Wedding Planner, and Monster-in-Law. Critics dismiss most of her recent films as empty romantic comedies that do little to bolster her filmography, but Lopez sees it differently. &amp;quot;I think Maid in Manhattan and Monster-in-Law are very layered movies,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;And that&amp;#039;s why they&amp;#039;re so successful. People don&amp;#039;t like shitty romantic comedies. Nothing that&amp;#039;s shitty is going to make $100 million.&amp;quot; In April, Lopez will continue her assault on the topic of love, or the lack thereof, starring in The Back-up Plan. As Zoe, an emotionally crippled, career-driven woman who&amp;#039;s tired of waiting for the right guy to have a baby with, she decides to undergo in vitro fertilization. On the day she&amp;#039;s inseminated, Murphy&amp;#039;s Law madness ensues and she bumps into Mr. Right. Lopez says she couldn&amp;#039;t have been better prepared for the role, having just gone through her own pregnancy. I can&amp;#039;t help but ask Lopez why she never considered in vitro for herself. (She has spoken publicly about how she&amp;#039;d all but given up on the possibility of having children before becoming pregnant with the twins.) &amp;quot;Because, like, when it comes to family and relationships, I&amp;#039;m quite traditional. Just because of the way I was raised. And I also believe in God and I have a lot of faith in that, so I just felt like you don&amp;#039;t mess with things like that. And I guess deep down I really felt like either this is not going to happen for me or it is. You know what I mean? And if it is, it will. And if it&amp;#039;s not, it&amp;#039;s not going to.&amp;quot; Directed by Six Feet Under executive producer Alan Poul, The Back-up Plan could be an edgier turn for Lopez. He tells me it&amp;#039;s a &amp;quot;female point of view response to the Judd Apatow fear of commitment&amp;quot; movies and gushes over Lopez&amp;#039;s work in the film. &amp;quot;She carries the whole movie,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;When I think of people who have the charisma, the personal magnetism, the class, and the tremendous physical comedy chops that Jennifer has, I think of Carole Lombard and Lucille Ball.&amp;quot; Big shoes to fill. Funny that Lopez sees herself more as a Brat Pack\u2013era Molly Ringwald and talks about obsessing over &amp;quot;Pretty in Pink movies&amp;quot; when she was a kid. After spending time with her, imbibing her ambition and artistic self-confidence, you actually wonder whether she might be a John Hughes. &amp;quot;My manager swears that I should direct,&amp;quot; Lopez says, sniffling into her balled-up tissue. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m like, I&amp;#039;m not ready to do that. Just let me do my thing.&amp;quot; Maybe when the twins are five or six? I suggest. &amp;quot;Maybe when I&amp;#039;m 71.&amp;quot; "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.elle.com/culture/celebrities/a2448/jennifer-lopez-391361/>