Pink lions, eh?
If you’ve been to Eric Church‘s downtown Nashville bar, Chief’s, you may not even notice all the little Easter eggs hidden throughout the bar. Church is obviously never one to do anything halfway, so pretty much everything in the venue has a meaning – even if it’s not immediately obvious.
One thing you may notice when you walk downstairs to the bottom level is the wallpaper that’s covered in…pink lions. But if you’re not familiar with the story behind one of Church’s earliest singles, the meaning behind the wallpaper may not be immediately obvious.
The pink lions are actually a nod to “Two Pink Lions,” the second single from Church’s debut album Sinners Like Me. The song was released in 2006, and was only a moderate success on the charts, peaking at #19 – no doubt because of its take on the subject of teen pregnancy.
If you’re not familiar with the song, it finds a young Church anxiously waiting outside of a store as his girlfriend of six weeks takes a pregnancy test inside, leaving them both anxiously waiting for “two pink lines.”
As it turns out, the song is one that Church wrote based on his own experience. During a CMA Songwriter Series interview years ago, Church revealed that he had been the guy in the song when he was younger:
“I have this song about pregnancy. It’s a personal song for me, because two pink lines happened to me when I was unmarried and a teenager.”
But as you can imagine, he wasn’t exactly thrilled to play the song for his mother, Rita. Gonna be an awkward conversation if she asks whether it’s a true story…
To his surprise, though, she was a fan from the first time she heard it:
“When I first played this for my mom, I was expecting her to be really bothered by it. She goes, ‘I love that song.’”
As it turns out though, she didn’t quite understand the meaning behind it:
“‘Why are you singing about two pink lions?’ I said, ‘Mom, I happen to love lions; I’m a big cat fan.’”
Aren’t we all.
Well that little miscommunication saved Church from having to awkwardly explain his teen pregnancy scare, and also led Church to install “pink lion” wallpaper in his Nashville bar a decade and a half after the song was released – in honor of his mom thinking he was singing about “two pink lions.”
Lucky for Church, it took his mom a while to figure out what he was really singing about in the song – which was probably for the best.
Church has also admitted that when he played the song for a label exec while trying to get a deal, they weren’t exactly a fan of a song about teen pregnancy. So maybe he should have just told them he was singing about pink lions?
Of course despite the (relative) lack of success on the charts, “Two Pink Lines” has become a fan-favorite – probably because it’s a song so many people can relate to (whether they’re embarrassed to admit it or not). And it also showed early on that Church wasn’t afraid to tackle tough subjects in his songwriting, delivering a compelling story through expertly-crafted lyrics.
