How do you write a worthy tribute to man’s best friend? This is the question behind Preston Woolsey’s album Bubba, an intimate ode to the childhood dog that saw Woolsey through his darkest years.

The album, out May 30, 2025 on Brooklyn-based label Rose Garden, tells the intertwining stories of the New Orleans-based musician and his family dog Boudreaux in ten gut-wrenching songs that capture the glorious highs and unbearable lows of love and loss.

“Both mine and his nicknames were Bubba,” Woolsey explains. “To Boudreaux, I was Bubba. To me, Boudreaux was Bubba. In a similar way, I see this record as telling the story of Boudreaux but also the story of my life through him.”

After joining the family during Woolsey’s middle school years, Boudreaux was one of the few constants in his life. As Preston relocated from Missouri to Louisiana and began homeschooling, Boudreaux was by his side. When he started college and dropped out two years later, Boudreaux was there. When he enlisted in the Air Force and shipped off to basic training, Boudreaux was his last goodbye.

Meanwhile, the other constant in Woolsey’s life was music — a hobby he more or less fell into while composing music for a homemade video game. “I didn’t even have enough levels for all the songs,” he laughs. “I downloaded FL Studio, started making little electronic songs, and very quickly realized it was way more fun than making video games.”

He began spending all his free time in a makeshift studio in his living room, teaching himself guitar and piano and reshaping his sound from lofi electronic into lush, cinematic folk evocative of early Bon Iver or Novo Amor. Boudreaux was the sole audience for many of his earlier songs, an unjudgmental listener and a patient companion through long nights of amateur songcraft.

By the time Woolsey left for basic training, he already had four albums up on Soundcloud. After dropping out of college and spending a few months mired in the existential confusion so common in one’s early twenties, he was ready for a drastic change. “I wanted to do something big, special, and very difficult,” Woolsey explains, describing his motivation for joining the Air Force. “Which did not go the way I planned.”

A grueling stint in military training didn't bring the clarity and purpose Woolsey was seeking, ripping yet another hole in the future he thought he’d wanted. At the same time, Boudreaux was diagnosed with cancer. “Every time I’d go home, I’d think this is it, this is the last time,” he says. “What do you say to your dog when you know it’s going to be the last thing you say?”

This sentiment comprises the bedrock of Bubba, a collection of songs written before, during, and after Boudreaux’s final moments. Some tracks overflow with joy — opening track “run you love thing” explodes in harmonies and strings in celebration of a simple game of fetch at the lake — while others are heavy with the darkness and distortion of all-consuming grief.

I think part of me died too / Yeah I sink when I swim, Woolsey sings in “not scared.” And part of me wants to drown in this world without you. As the album closer, the song is gutting in its honesty — how do you imagine a future without the guiding light that kept you grounded?

The song’s quiet acceptance stands in stark contrast to the anger and passion in titular track “Bubba,” which peaks in a chorus of horns and shouts before waning into a stubborn refrain: I’ll never leave you again.

Meanwhile, glimmers of hope stud the album where you least expect them, wrapping Woolsey’s pain in a blanket of delicate gratitude. “Your Combination” is stunningly soft, capturing the kind of clarity and reverence only unlocked by unfathomable grief. “Nobody has been, can be, or will ever have the same relationship with me that I had with my dog,” Woolsey reflects, adding that the song is “inspired by the feeling of waking up and seeing him at the foot of my bed.”

For years, Boudreaux had tempered Woolsey’s shame with unconditional admiration, eased his isolation with quiet fellowship. The unimaginable loss of such unadulterated love is felt deeply in every note of Bubba, from the fragile, almost shivering falsetto in “stumbler” to the grand cacophony of horns and guitars that builds to a heart-rending crescendo in “the critters.”

By the time the album was finished, it felt like a parting gift from Boudreaux himself: After years of perceived trying and failing, Woolsey had finally accomplished the “big, special, and difficult” thing he’d always dreamed of. He’d created a piece of art that immortalized Boudreaux forever, capturing his love in the petrified amber of a musical eulogy.

In this sense, Woolsey answers the enduring question asked by any person who has felt the pure, unquestioning love of an animal: How do I say thank you? How can I ever express what you meant to me?

“I’m gonna be writing songs about Boudreaux until the day I die,” says Woolsey. “I just need the world to know he existed.”