Country Life

Country Life was released on 15 November 1974 by Island, and by Atco in the US. It reached number 3 in the UK and number 37 in the US, the band's first top 40 album there. The single All I Want Is You reached number 12 in the UK. Ferry took the title from the British rural lifestyle magazine. Jim Miller wrote in Rolling Stone in 1975 that Stranded and Country Life together marked the zenith of contemporary British art rock, and Rolling Stone placed the album at number 387 on its 2003 list of the 500 greatest albums.

The Thrill of It All opens the album with a quotation from Dorothy Parker's poem Resume: You might as well live. Eddie Jobson's violin dominates the flanged Out of the Blue, which became a live favorite. Bitter-Sweet has passages of German oom-pah, Triptych an Elizabethan flavor, and If It Takes All Night a Southern-rock edge. Three and Nine looks back on the pre-decimal price of a cinema ticket, 3 shillings and ninepence. Casanova is a more cynical, hard-rocking critique of the jet set, and Prairie Rose is an ode to Texas. Pitchfork's Tom Ewing praised the album's delightful variety, naming the pastiche of Prairie Rose and the gothic folly of Triptych.

The cover shows two models, Constanze Karoli and Eveline Grunwald, whom Ferry met in Portugal and who helped him with the German words for Bitter-Sweet. Eric Boman took the photograph. It was censored in the US and Spain, early US copies came in opaque shrink wrap, and in Australia some shops sold copies in black plastic sleeves. The author Michael Ochs called the result the most complete cover-up in rock history.