Bill Stiteler posted "The Puerto Rico Song" on April 3 to his Instagram and TikTok accounts — a short, comic track built from footage of him visiting San Juan and other places in Puerto Rico and crafted with the AI-powered music app Suno.
The TikTok clip has drawn more than 3.3 million views and prompted lip-sync videos from Sarah Hyland, Luke Combs and Jennifer Love Hewitt; actor Brian Jordan Alvarez has made multiple posts featuring the song, and Stiteler said Alvarez kicked off the trend. Stiteler wrote the lyrics himself and used Suno to turn his voice and lines into a finished piece: "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.
Stiteler’s video is part of a string of travel songs he posts under the TikTok handle @saxboybilly18. The source says he makes funny travel songs about different cities and countries; the first city he made a song for was Altoona, Pa., and he has created pieces aimed at local scenes, including one specifically about the Grove. The source also says he has not done an LA song.
The Puerto Rico stop came this year as Stiteler followed a story line he has woven into his content: the Pittsburgh Pirates’ historic ties to the island. Stiteler visited Puerto Rico and Caguas to see where Roberto Clemente had played baseball in his early 20s — Clemente later played for the Pirates from 1955 to 1972 — and folded those visits into his travel song video. In late 2023, after getting sober, Stiteler moved back to Pittsburgh to live with his dad; in 2024 he purchased a Pittsburgh Pirates season pass, began posting videos of himself at home games, and followed the team on the road to 18 different cities.
That backstory explains why a clip about beaches and ballfields caught on: Stiteler said he isn’t trying to post typical travel content. "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 said. He also explained a motive behind his framing: "People don't want to see pretty beaches on Instagram," he said, noting his preference for oddball city details and local characters over postcard images.
The viral reach exposes a tension in how creators find audiences today. A comedian who recently moved back home and started attending ballgames has turned AI tools into a production shortcut and, with a handful of celebrity lip-syncs, vaulted into a viral moment. Stiteler put the technology and intent plainly: the music is manufactured by an app and the lyrics are meant to be silly and immediate — and yet it landed at scale. "People didn’t care about the 'worst baseball team in modern history,'" he said, acknowledging that interest in the Pirates alone wouldn't explain the surge.
There is a clear line from small-town songs to the Puerto Rico clip: Stiteler’s page is known for these quick, AI-assisted travel pieces, and this one intersected with a pop-culture moment when recognizable performers posted their own takes. For Stiteler that collision felt surreal; when asked about the celebrity attention, he said simply, "What? That's crazy."
The lesson of the moment is straightforward: novel use of AI in short-form music, combined with celebrity amplification, can turn a local creator’s travel joke into a national clip. For Stiteler — sober, back in Pittsburgh and following the Pirates for the first full season since moving home — the viral lift is less about formal musicianship than about reaching people with a repeated formula he’s already built. He summed up the surprise in three words: "What? That's crazy."
