Pions and kaons have double nature: the chiral dynamics of Nambu-Goldstone bosons together with the usual string dynamics common to all mesons. To uncover the interplay of both dynamics the effective chiral Lagrangian is derived from the QCD Lagrangian using the Field Correlator method and the ion self-energy (mass) operator is written explicitly. The latter contains an infinite number of poles, but normalized to zero at zero momentum because of spontaneous chiral symmetry breaking. As a result one obtains the Gell-Mann-Oakes-Renner relation for the ground state pion and (slightly shifted by chiral dynamics) the usual spectrum of radially excited pions starting with pi(1300).