John welcomes his four-year-old son to Bermuda with a long hug. Under the pseudonym John Green, he’s rented Undercliff, a house two miles from Bermuda’s capital, Hamilton.

By day, he plays with Sean on the sun-splashed beach, searching for sea glass and building castles in Bermuda’s famous pink sands.

With the evening serenade of whistling tree frogs, he sits alone on the veranda with his Ovation acoustic guitar—the one he’s avoided for so long. He sets up two Panasonic boom boxes to record his music.

He dedicates a song called “Nobody Told Me” to Ringo, speaking into the demo tape, “This one’s for Mister Starkey.”

John fights to get rid of his self-consciousness, the scolding inner voice that for the last five years has relentlessly criticized: You can’t do that. That song’s not good enough. Remember, you’re the guy who wrote “A Day in the Life.” Try again.

It’s a lonely battle. He calls Yoko in New York. She doesn’t answer.

He’s plunged into emotional distress, then remembers a song he started and abandoned more than ten years earlier. He reworks the music and lyrics to “Stranger’s Room” into “I’m Losing You,” a passionate reflection on love in its final throes, adding a powerful guitar riff.

“I’m getting all this stuff,” he says when he finally reaches Yoko. She listens quietly as he plays back the tape of John singing directly to her, “Don’t want to lose you, now.”

“Incredible song,” Yoko says. “It’s so beautifully written and the emotion is so powerful.”

Two hours later, John’s phone rings. Yoko has written a companion song to “I’m Losing You”—“I’m Moving On,” her personal take on the complexity of adult relationships.

Suddenly, John’s feelings of despair lift into free-form creativity. “I like it to be inspirational—from the spirit,” he says, and as the calls fly between Bermuda and New York, they keep making songs.

John is feeling so good that he goes out to a dance club—“for the first time since 1967,” he says. The DJ is spinning a song from an American group’s debut album. “I suddenly heard ‘Rock Lobster’ by the B-52’s for the first time,” John says, and he feels an instant connection. “It sounds just like Yoko’s music.”

This person’s studied her, he thinks. They’ve finally caught up to where we were.

Not knowing that the B-52’s had indeed created the song as a “tribute to Yoko,” John takes the similarities as another sign that it’s time to get back in the studio.

More inspiration appears. When John takes Sean to the Bermuda Botanical Gardens, a sanctuary for local foliage that dates from the turn of the twentieth century, they walk through cedar and palmetto trees to enter a flowering garden.