The Man Behind the Trail Blazers' Elusive Birthday Song

If you’ve been to a Trail Blazers game, you know the song. You know nothing about the song, or where it came from, but you know it.

At some point during every game at Moda Center, the video board displays birthday and welcome messages from fans who paid to have them put there.

Once upon a time, the music that played underneath these messages was the Beatles’ “Birthday.” But sometime in the last decade, that was replaced by a late-‘90s/early-‘00s-sounding pop-punk song with these lyrics, repeated four times:

It’s your birthday
Another year has come and gone
Days go by so quickly
My love for you keeps getting stronger
It’s your birthday
Hope you have the greatest time
You deserve the best in life
And I’ll be there to see you shine

Nobody has encountered this song anywhere but at a Blazers game. Shazam can’t identify it, and the only results that come up from a Google search of the lyrics are a few threads on the r/RipCity subreddit asking if anyone knows what the song is. These days, you'd assume it was AI-generated, but it's been around too long for that.

It’s a rare feat in 2026 for the answer to a question like this to not be readily available online, but the Blazers’ game operations department managed it. And the reason they were able to keep the song’s origins a secret is simple—they didn’t know, either.

Every time over the past few years that I asked the team's longtime in-game DJ, O.G. One, and director of game operations Todd Bosma if they could tell me anything about the song's origins, they both said the same thing: nobody knew.

Finally, just weeks before the Blazers seemingly retired the song late last season, Bosma came to me with a breakthrough that helped me finally crack one of the most enduring mysteries of the last decade.

He told me to talk to a man named Fred Coury.