one not too dissimilar to what the ever-prescient David Bowie had delivered two years earlier with Low". The album is notable for being the first album where singer David Sylvian used his newfound baritone vocal style, which became one of the band's most distinctive hallmarks. Lyrically the title track refers to problems the band was going through at the time, having lost their US record contract and the lack of commercial success in the UK. It has been suggested that the rest of the songs reflect a travelogue relating to impressions the band had gained from touring the world. The oriental sounding "A Foreign Place" was left off the album but later appeared as the B-side on the single "Quiet Life". In a 1982 interview, Sylvian commented that Quiet Life was the only Japan album that the band worked on together in a truly collaborative manner, as he would (regretfully) come to dominate the recording sessions for subsequent albums. Later in his career, Sylvian said of the album: "I still feel very attached to it – unusual for me. We reached a peak with this album – we knew what we were doing." Release Quiet Life was first released on 17 November 1979 in Canada, with journalist Rosalind Russell describing Japan as being a "cult band in Canada" and that the album was "shifting copies like candles in a power strike". The band travelled to Toronto to perform two sets at the Ryerson Theatre on 24 November, which was their first show in six months (and also their last ever performance in North America), and was the first to feature Jane Shorter on saxophone. The album was then released in Japan on 20 December 1979 and then everywhere else in January 1980 due to a delay in manufacturing the album. It was released in the UK on 18 January. Though initially unsuccessful upon its release in the band's native UK (where it peaked at No. 72 in February 1980), the album returned to the charts in early 1982 after the commercial success of 1981's Tin Drum and the Hansa Records compilation Assemblage. It then peaked at No. 53, two years after its original release, and was eventually certified "Gold" by the BPI in 1984 for 100,000 copies sold. The title track, "Quiet Life", was released as a single in Japan in 1979 and in Germany in 1980. In other countries,