Bill Stiteler posted “The Puerto Rico Song” on April 3, and the comedy travel track quickly raced across Instagram and TikTok. The video has drawn more than 3.3 million views on TikTok, helped along by a wave of lip-sync posts from Sarah Hyland, Luke Combs and Jennifer Love Hewitt.
Stiteler, who wrote the song with the AI-powered music app Suno, built the clip around a trip to Puerto Rico and San Juan, with scenes from the capital and other parts of the island. The lyrics lean into the joke from the start: “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 hit at a moment when Stiteler’s travel posts were already finding an audience beyond his own followers. English Teacher star and creator Brian Jordan Alvarez made multiple posts with the song, and Stiteler said Alvarez kicked off the trend. Stiteler described the app as something like an auto tuner for lyrics and voice, saying he could sing into it and have AI turn the idea into music.
That matters because Stiteler is not trying to sell himself as a trained musician. He said he is a comedian who can write funny little songs about what he notices, and that the appeal is watching “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.”
The Puerto Rico trip also connected back to baseball. Stiteler visited Puerto Rico and Caguas to see where Roberto Clemente had played baseball in his early 20s, and the song is part of his wider series of travel videos focused on lesser-explored places. He said he created his first city song for Altoona, Pa., where he discovered Suno.
Stiteler’s move into this kind of posting came after a hard reset in his own life. He said he got sober in late 2023 and moved back to Pittsburgh to live with his dad after what he called a nine-year break doing nothing but drinking alcohol following years in New York City as a comedian.
In 2024, he bought a Pittsburgh Pirates season pass and began posting videos of himself going to home games. He said he also went to 18 different cities while following the team on the road that year. That is where the Puerto Rico song fits: a comic travel diary shaped by baseball, place and the kind of cities many viewers might never have looked up on their own.
For now, the answer to why this track spread is simple. It is funny, it is specific and it gives people a new way to look at Puerto Rico without the postcard tone Stiteler says he wants to avoid. “People don't want to see pretty beaches on Instagram,” he said, and the numbers suggest he is right.
