bonus CD. Tim was culled from the same sessions as the album and featured live staple "Born At Zero," commenting on the fact that the sessions produced a lot of material O'Neil stated that the band "had two really good producers that got a lot of good stuff out of us without letting us go. We focused a lot on performance." In December 2011, O'Neil revealed that he along with Dennis Ryan and Titus Andronicus bassist and old school friend Julian Veronesi were working on a project called Dirt Naps. In April 2012, the self-titled debut album by Diamond Rugs, a band formed and co-fronted by McCauley with Hardy Morris of Dead Confederate and Ian Saint Pé of Black Lips, was released. The album also featured Rob Crowell on bass with drummer Bryan Dufresne from Six Finger Satellite and former Los Lobos member Steve Berlin. A second Diamond Rugs album, titled Cosmetics, was recorded during a 9-day recording session in August 2013. Negativity On September 24, 2013, the band released their fifth album Negativity. The album was produced by Steve Berlin and displayed a slicker polished sound than previous releases, with McCauley revealing that Berlin changed the structure of every song he took to the sessions and "doesn’t settle for any of that kind of raggedy, kind of charming, first take kind of sound." Crowell added that "Steve had a really large hand in shaping this album" and that "there is a fair bit of layering on the album, but I like it as the keyboardist, because there is more keyboards." The album was preceded by the Ian O'Neil song "The Dream's In The Ditch," which was originally intended for his Dirt Naps project. The band performed the song on Conan on September 25, 2013. Many of McCauley's songs on the album were written on piano instead of guitar and were put together while on vacation in Namibia and Johannesburg in 2012. The band demoed close to 30 songs for the album, with Berlin picking 12 to work on including a duet with pop singer Vanessa Carlton on "In Our Time." McCauley later married Carlton in December 2013 in a ceremony officiated by former Fleetwood Mac singer Stevie Nicks. The album was influenced by recent events in McCauley's life including his father, a Democrat who represented Providence, pleading guilty to filing false tax returns and conspiring to defraud the federal