BEGIN -- Kono Machi Hanarete（この街はなれて）

I think that there's a saying about really getting to know your own hometown only when you're separated from it for a length of time.

Perhaps that is the thrust behind Okinawan folk-blues band BEGIN's "Kono Machi Hanarete" (Leaving This Town), a happy-sad tune that talks of a young fellow who's leaving his own home willingly to go on a search for himself, and maybe to realize how good his birthplace has been to him all these years.

I don't know very much about Okinawan music, but what I do know has been wrapped around the native three-stringed lute known as the sanshin, and with "Kono Machi Hanarete", there's something more foreign. This seems to be more planted in the terra firma of America with a zydeco accordion and a twangy blues guitar that sounds as if someone from Ego-Wrappin' decided to drop in for a spell.

BEGIN was responsible for words and music, and it probably made its first appearance in the band's first BEST compilation, "FAN -- Little Pieces" released in March 1995. But it has also appeared in their third BEST album "Ballads" in March 1999.