The Weight of the Pint

I didn’t set out to write a song about Guinness.

Then again, I didn’t set out to write a book about Guinness either.

Pints and Power began with a question I couldn’t quite shake: why did this pint keep showing up in my life with a weight that felt larger than the glass?

Following that question took me through Ireland and its history, through empire and revolution, famine and emigration, pubs and music, family and friendship. It took me into conversations with people who helped me understand that sometimes a pint isn’t really about what’s in the glass at all.

It’s about who is sitting beside you.

It’s about where you came from. Who isn’t there anymore. The story being told for the hundredth time. The song everyone somehow knows. The silence when words aren’t necessary.

It’s about the space we make for one another.

Somewhere in all of that, I started hearing a song.

The Weight of the Pint

The words grew from the same stories and ideas I’ve been living with while writing Pints and Power.

There’s Arthur Guinness putting his name to an extraordinary lease in a Dublin still living under British rule. There’s the complicated relationship between Guinness and empire, an Irish product traveling the world through the very machinery of imperial power.

There’s famine and loss. Revolution and endurance. The brewery standing while Dublin burned.

There’s the pub as common ground, including places where people divided by politics, religion, borders and history could still order the same pint and remain at the same table.

And there’s the ritual itself.

The darkness. The white head. The wait.

One thought kept coming back:

The pint has weight beyond what it seems.

That became the center of the song.

I didn’t want to write an advertisement for Guinness. I wanted to write about its weight in the world, including the complicated parts of that story and the shadow that can exist beneath the foam.

That’s also why I kept the word Guinness out of the song until its final line.

If the song worked, you should know what the pint is long before I tell you.

I could hear it. I just couldn’t play it.

I’m not a musician.

I love music. There was a time when I could play a little, but those days are behind me. Still, I think I have some inclination for what works musically. I know when something moves me. I can hear when a song wants to rise, when it needs to pull back, when a voice should stand alone and when a room should come in behind it.

And when I wrote these words, I could hear this one.

I just couldn’t play it for you.

That’s where AI came into the process.

I used Suno as a way to give sound to what I was hearing, working through the feel, arrangement and performance until something came back remarkably close.

And there was something about this version I hadn’t anticipated.

The crowd is there before the song even begins.

They’re cheering as though they already know what’s coming. There’s almost the feeling of an encore, a singer returning to perform a song the room has heard before.

Considering what I was trying to write, that stopped me.

I wanted a song that carried something of the Irish song tradition. Something that didn’t merely tell a story, but felt like it might have been passed around a room.

And suddenly I was hearing my words performed as though, somewhere, they already had been.

I’m under no illusion about how it was made. I’m still not a musician, and this isn’t a performance I gave.

AI simply gave me an instrument I didn’t have before: a way to let someone else hear something I could hear but couldn’t perform myself.

And I wanted to share it.

Listen: The Weight of the Pint

The Lyrics

Verse 1

The world knows the pint from far shores to Cork,

Black glass crowned in white, drawn slow from the dark,

But Ireland knows deeper what rests in the foam,

A story passed quietly, a feeling of home

It’s the first one a father will raise to a son,

And the last one in silence when the long day is done,

Not the loudest among them, nor sharpest in sting,

But the one that marks moments we don’t often sing

Chorus

Oh the pint has weight beyond what it seems,

It carries our sorrow, our songs, and our dreams,

It asks for no side and it claims no control,

But it lets us sit long enough to steady the soul

Verse 2

It started in ink on a cold Dublin day,

A lease set to outlast what empires would say,

In a city divided by hunger and crown,

A quiet man chose to lay something down

The barrels went outward on tide and on trade,

But each drop still carried the land where it’s made,

For Irish hands formed it, and Irish hearts knew,

There’s pride in the darkness and truth breaking through

Chorus

Oh the pint has weight beyond what it seems,

It carries our labor, our losses, our dreams,

It marches with no one, yet stands through the fight,

And stays when the rest of the world fades from sight

Verse 3

Through famine and silence when breath had grown thin,

It stood with the living, though death settled in,

No cure and no savior, no voice raised in plea,

Just a quiet companion where the broken could be

And when Dublin was burning with rifle and rhyme,

It stood there unmoving through fracture and time,

No banner above it, no cry to recall,

But a name held like defiance when shadows would fall

Bridge

There’s a shadow beneath it we don’t always face,

In the lift of the glass and the warmth of the place,

For what gives us comfort can ask for its due,

And the line between both is a hard one to view

So we raise it with care, with both hands if we may,

For the gift that it brings and the price that it may,

Let the story stay ours, not the other way ’round,

For the truest of songs are the ones seldom found

Final Chorus

Oh the pint has weight beyond what it seems,

It carries our love and the loss in between,

It won’t make us whole, nor tear us apart,

But it lets us sit close and speak from the heart

Outro

So here’s to the places where slow pours begin,

Where time isn’t counted and no one must win,

For the world may know the pint, but now you understand this:

It’s not just what you’re drinking… it’s a shared pint of Guinness

One more unexpected stop on the journey

Writing Pints and Power has taken me places I never expected when I started.

Apparently, one of them was writing a song.

I don’t know what happens to it from here. Maybe nothing. Maybe it remains one of those unexpected things this journey gave me.

That’s enough.

Because while the production was made possible by technology that didn’t exist until very recently, there’s nothing new about what sits underneath it.

Memory. Place. Pride. Loss. Friendship. Belonging.

Stories becoming songs.

People gathering to share them.

I heard something when I wrote these words.

Now you can hear it too.

Settle in. THIS pint won’t drink itself.

— Mike