On April 3, Bill Stiteler’s Instagram and TikTok accounts took the world to San Juan through a song simply titled “The Puerto Rico Song.” Now, it’s social media’s latest earworm — but it’s just one of many videos the Pittsburgh-based comedian has created in his quest to document the world’s lesser-explored cities.
“The Puerto Rico Song,” like all of Stiteler’s travel videos, was written by Stiteler and crafted with the AI-powered music app Suno. It features clips of Stiteler visiting Puerto Rico’s capital city, among others, while a poppy song about the trip plays in the background, with lyrics including:
Immediately was enchanted/ The whole plane clapped when we landed/ Didn’t wanna do just tourist stuff/ So I took the bus to Caguas/ It’s a wild place to vacation/ Slot machines in the bus station.
The video, which features beautiful shots of the city as well as more mundane moments like taking the subway, visiting a local grocery store and a Barack Obama statue spotting, has garnered more than 3.3 million views on TikTok. Its fans range from Modern Family’s Sarah Hyland to country star Luke Combs and Jennifer Love Hewitt, who have posted their own videos lip syncing to the track. English Teacher star and creator Brian Jordan Alvarez has made multiple posts featuring the song, and Stiteler credits the actor with kicking off the trend.
How Bill Stiteler turned his hometown baseball passion into travel content
Stiteler’s journey to virality didn’t start in Puerto Rico — it began in Pittsburgh. The comedian told Yahoo that after spending years in New York City as a comedian, he “took a little nine year break to do nothing but drink alcohol.” After he got sober in late 2023, he moved back to Pittsburgh to live with his dad and regroup. In 2024, he purchased a Pittsburgh Pirates season pass and started posting videos of himself going to the team’s home games on social media.
“I remember, like, a day after I made my first video, someone came up to me and was like, ‘Yeah, I saw your video,’ and I was like, ‘What? That’s crazy.’ That happened very fast,” he said.
He kept growing the account, and as it got more attention, he had the idea to move on from home games to following the Pirates on the road. In 2024, he went to 18 different cities following the team — making videos along the way. The very first city for which he created a song was Altoona, Penn., he said. That’s when he discovered Suno.
“It’s kind of like an auto tuner for lyrics and your voice — you can sing into it, and it can auto tune it into using AI to make music,” he said. “I’m not a musician, I don’t know anything about music, but I’m a comedian, and I can write these funny little songs about all my observations.”
He began to realize that people didn’t care about the “worst baseball team in modern history.” What they were really attracted to, he said, was “the adventures of this guy discovering cities you don’t really know about — baseball towns and cities people don’t really think of as traditional destinations.”
How ‘The Puerto Rico Song’ was born
It was still the Pirates that led Stiteler to Puerto Rico. While the Pirates didn’t have a game on the island, it is where Pirates icon Roberto Clemente, who played for the team from 1955 to 1972, grew up. Stiteler visited Puerto Rico, and specifically Caguas, to see where Clemente played baseball in his early 20s.
Though people don’t really go to Caguas for vacation, Stiteler said he found that there’s a big interest in these lesser-explored places when it comes to international travel too. “People don’t want to see pretty beaches on Instagram,” he said. “It’s boring. We’ve hit peak ‘pretty place’ on Instagram and social media, I think.”
In addition to creating more addictive songs about other cities, Stiteler is leaning into the travel side of his content with his podcast The Saxcast, as well as his blog The Saxboy Travel Club, which is available on Patreon. And he plans to see even more of the world — particularly the places that not every travel influencer goes to.
“I want to find the Pittsburghs of different countries, because there’s a bazillion videos on Paris,” he said. “I want to see the ‘Rust Belt’ of, like, Argentina. Or, what are the industrial towns of France?”
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.yahoo.com ’
