“This is not the girl you used to know,” Jennifer Lopez sings on the title track of her new album, A.K.A. “It took you too long to find out/ What you want right now.”
Some will, no doubt, be keen to interpret the lyrics as a dig at Casper Smart, the dancer/choreographer who was, until recently, Lopez’s beau. But chatting in a girlfriend’s apartment about a week before the album’s arrival, Lopez, 44, insists that she and Smart are still “good friends, and I hope we always will be.”
Instead, the songs on A.K.A., out Tuesday, reflect what Lopez describes as a general period of transformation, informed by both professional developments and personal ones, such as her split from third husband Marc Anthony, the father of her 6-year-old twins, Emme and Max.
