After diving into a “YouTube rathole” of Tom Jones videos, Bottle Rockets frontman Brian Henneman decided to see if he could write a song the Welsh crooner might sing. The result, “XOYOU,” premieres today on Speakeasy.

Henneman would be the first to tell you the song doesn’t sound much like the man who inspired it, despite the band’s intentions. “We went into that with full-on Tom Jones in mind, knowing damn well I can’t sing like Tom Jones, and wasn’t even trying to,” Henneman says. “When the Bottle Rockets in the past have tried to sound like somebody else, it always sounds different.”

“XOYOU” started as a song called “I Can’t Dance With You.” Henneman didn’t like the direction it was going, but the “mumbo-jumbo, nonsense sounds” he was singing while playing the music more or less evolved into the current lyrics. The tune was actually one of two songs Henneman wrote in a Jones-y vein for what turned out to be the Bottle Rockets’ new album, “South Broadway Athletic Club.” The other, “Monday (Everytime I Turn Around)," opens the album, which Henneman says wasn’t initially intended to be an album. The band first thought about releasing each track as a single, then ended up compiling into an 11-song collection.

“It’s sort of an album from the modern day,” Henneman says. “People buy one song at a time these days.”

“South Broadway Athletic Club” is the Bottle Rockets’ 11th studio album, and the follow-up to the St. Louis band’s 2011 release “Not So Loud.” Henneman started the group in 1992 with drummer Mark Ortmann and two musicians who have since left, and they released their self-titled first album the following year.