He made up a song about traveling to Puerto Rico. Try getting ‘first time in San Juan, my son’ out of your head.
On April 3, Bill Stiteler’s instagram and TikTok accounts took the world to San Juan by way of a song merely titled “The Puerto Rico Song.” Now it is social media’s newest earworm — however it’s only one of many movies the Pittsburgh-based comic has created in his quest to doc the world’s lesser-explored cities.
“The Puerto Rico Song,” like all of Stiteler’s journey movies, was written by Stiteler and crafted with the AI-powered music app Suno. It options clips of Stiteler visiting Puerto Rico’s capital metropolis, amongst others, whereas an upbeat pop song about the journey performs in the background, with lyrics together with:
Immediately was enchanted/The complete airplane clapped once we landed/Didn’t wanna do exactly vacationer stuff/So I took the bus to Caguas/It’s a wild place to trip/Slot machines in the bus station.
The video, which options lovely pictures of town in addition to extra mundane moments like taking the subway, visiting a native grocery retailer and a Barack Obama statue recognizing, has garnered greater than 3.3 million views on TikTok. Its followers vary from Modern Family‘s Sarah Hyland to country star Luke Combs and Jennifer Love Hewittwho’ve posted their very own movies lip-syncing to the observe. English Teacher star and creator Brian Jordan Alvarez has made a number of posts that includes the song, and Stiteler credit the actor with kicking off the development.
How Bill Stiteler turned his hometown baseball ardour into journey content material
Stiteler’s journey to virality did not begin in Puerto Rico — it started in Pittsburgh. The comic informed Yahoo that after spending years in New York City as a comic, he “took a little nine-year break to do nothing but drink alcohol.” After he obtained sober in late 2023, he moved again to Pittsburgh to dwell along with his dad and regroup. In 2024, he bought a Pittsburgh Pirates season cross and began posting movies of himself going to the crew’s house video 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 stored rising the account, and because it obtained extra consideration, he had the concept to transfer on from house video games to following the Pirates on the highway. In 2024, he went to 18 completely different cities following the crew — making movies alongside the way in which. He says that the very first metropolis for which he created a song was Altoona, Pa. That’s once I found 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 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 had played baseball in his early 20s.
Although 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 ‘fairly place’ on Instagram and social media, I feel.”
In addition to creating extra addictive songs about different cities, Stiteler is leaning into the journey aspect of his content material along with his podcast The Saxcastin addition to his weblog the Saxboy Travel Clubwhich is out there on Patreon. And he plans to see much more of the world — significantly the locations that not each journey influencer goes to.
“I want to find the Pittsburghs of different countries, because there’s a bazillion videos on Paris,” he said. “I would like to see the ‘Rust Belt’ of, like, Argentina. Or, what are the commercial cities of France?”
