When you request a song from an Irish band, be careful what you ask for. When someone asked us to do a Chappell Roan tune, we said no. However, we thought of it on the ride home and "Green Irish Pub", our take on Chappell Roan's "Pink Pony Club", was born. We moved her club into an Irish pub, her pink turned to green, and her lyric rebuilt out of the places, drinks, and Irish words of the rooms we actually play. The tune and the shape are hers.
From West Hollywood to Galway Bay
Newly arrived in Los Angeles from Missouri, Chappell Roan went to The Abbey, a gay bar in West Hollywood, and found for the first time a place where she could truly be herself and not be judged — "complete love and acceptance," as she put it. She turned that experience into the song "Pink Pony Club," released in 2020 and carried to a much bigger audience on her 2023 album The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess. The Pink Pony Club became shorthand for a place where anyone can walk in and feel welcome exactly as they are.
Our version keeps her opening almost exactly, and then turns it. We both describe a special place where boys and girls can be themselves - "be queens" or simply "enjoy the craic" every single day. The invitation is the same — you belong in this room. While her dreams were of leaving Tennessee, ours are of Ireland — Galway Bay, Killarney, St. Stephen's Green, Seamus' stories and Maeve's distinct voice. It is the same homesick-for-somewhere-else song.
Where the Craic Is Grand: The Words in the Lyric
The Irish use words that mean different things than they mean in America. Two Irish words meet in the line — "Where the craic is grand, it's where I belong" — and both need explaining to an American ear, because neither means quite what it looks like.
Craic — pronounced exactly like "crack" — is the good time itself: the fun, the lively conversation, the stories and the laughter in a room full of people enjoying each other. "What's the craic?" means "what's happening, what's the news?" "Great craic" or "mighty craic" means the night was a brilliant one. It is a social word — you do not really have craic on your own.
Grand does not mean great or large in Ireland. In everyday Irish use, grand means fine, okay, good, no problem. "I'm grand" means "I'm fine." "It'll be grand" means "it will work out — stop worrying." Our lyric uses it twice, and the second use is the truer one: "Every night's the same old thing — to me that is grand." Grand is not excitement. Grand is contentment — the same room, the same songs, the same people, and that being enough. So "the craic is grand" is a small sentence doing double duty: the fun in this place is good, and the people having it are fine — fine as they are, in this room, right now. That is acceptance in one syllable, and it is why the next line, "it's where I belong," lands.
The rest of the lyric speaks pub fluently, and two more phrases are worth translating:
Sláinte. "With the black stuff firm in hand, I slainte to the band." Sláinte is the Irish toast — pronounced roughly "SLAWN-cha," and it means "health." You are not just saying cheers; you are wishing everybody at the table good health. The black stuff, for anyone who has never ordered it, is Guinness.
Split the G is the Guinness drinker's game: your first gulp of a fresh pint should leave the line between beer and foam sitting right through the middle of the "G" on the Guinness glass. Too little and you have not committed; too much and you have blown past it. It is a small feat, but a real one — the kind you want witnesses for.
When we get to "God, what have you done?" in Roan's version it is the scream of a horrified mother, and the singer answers in defiance. In ours we are calling a friend who isn't at the pub yet, telling them I just split the G and you didn't get to witness it! Get down to the pub, brother. You are missing all of this.
Keeping the Heart of the Original: "It's Where I Belong"
A colour swap alone would just be a joke — pink to green, the same trick as our Emerald Rain, and we have already made that joke properly once. This one asked for more care, because "Pink Pony Club" is not really about a club. It is about the relief of finding the place where you stop apologizing for who you are.
So that is what we kept, and the lyric keeps returning to it: "It's where I belong" closes the pre-chorus, every time, and the second refrain says it from the other side — "I could be stuck at home, but here I'm not alone." The Irish pub can carry that meaning. We make that case at length in our post on the Irish Pub Song: people with no Irish blood at all tell us they feel welcome in an Irish pub in a way they do not everywhere, because the room expects you to join in. If you don't know how, we'll show you.
Our bridge is where the two songs shake hands most honestly. Roan's singer promises she has not left home behind. Ours is blunter about adult life: "Don't think I've left you all behind — kids to raise and bills to pay and much more on my mind." The pub is not an escape from that life; we shouldn't be there every day. But the bridge ends with the most Irish move in the whole song: "raise a glass and remember all those who could not stay." That is the emigrant story - people we left behind, lost connection with, or who have passed away. They all deserve to be remembered and the pub is a place where their story can be shared.
That may be why audiences have taken to it. Our Short of the song is one of the most-watched clips on our channel. The song now works from both ends at once: half the room knows the melody because they love the original, and the other half knows what we are describing with our version because they live it — Dirty Old Town on the band's set list and the bodhrán beating under all of it, just like the lyric says.
To hear it from Roan herself: her interview with V Magazine tells the Abbey story in her own words, and Mental Floss traces craic from Scots "crack" to the Irish spelling in What Does the Irish Word 'Craic' Mean?
— hear us play it live (video above).