SAN FRANCISCO -- Though not as widely known in the U.S. as he is in Europe and the U.K., former Marillion lead vocalist and established solo artist Fish has made a great reputation for himself as both a talented songwriter, thought-provoking lyricist and emotive singer. Though they were something of an anomaly during the early '80s rise of new wave and hair metal, neo-progressive rock quintet Marillion found a significant audience with their ambitious epics, virtuoso musicianship and the poetic ruminations of towering lead singer Fish (aka Derek W. Dick). Though his voice and onstage theatrics (particularly his early penchant for costumes and face-painting) recalled '70s prog pioneer Peter Gabriel, Fish found his own niche with his gift for heart-on-the-sleeve delivery and vivid storytelling songs.

Fish and Marillion parted ways late in the decade after four successful studio albums including the hit concept effort Misplaced Childhood. While the singer's solo career has sometimes been hampered by record label politics that have made his releases tough to find stateside, he cultivated a solid fan base through the innovative use of his Web site for direct distribution long before bands like Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails were making albums available for free download. Garnering some of the best reviews of his over quarter century in the music business with his latest solo effort 13th Star, the gregarious Scottish artist spoke with KTVU.com on the eve of launching his first U.S. tour in a decade with a date at San Francisco's Great American Music Hall.

KTVU.com: The reviews for this latest album must be very encouraging. Are they what precipitated this first U.S. tour in so many years?

Fish: It's quite exciting actually. Everything has kind of fallen into place. It's just been pure accident that this American tour has come to be. We got the offer from NEARfest [an annual progressive-rock festival being held in Bethlehem, PA] and it was such that we could bring the guys over; they helped us out with their visas. The guys at NEARfest were stunning. So I said to my agent, 'If we're coming across for NEARfest, what are the chances of stringing some more dates together?' I was thinking we might get two or three, maybe five max. And within two week he came back with fifteen shows, coast to coast. The figures were such that it was right on the edge, it was going to be tough, but we were going to be able to make this work with a fair wind.

And with having an album like 13th Star behind us, suddenly I found my distributor was changing. I was moving across to Koch and they were having a big sales conference in Cancun, Mexico, three days before our tour was starting. So I'm down in Cancun talking the game with Koch, and they're getting excited, and suddenly I've got an entire catalog that's going to be re-released over the next twelve months in a definitive form. And we're getting great reviews for 13th Star. It's really positive. An opportunity has opened up that's given us more light than has been shown on us in the States for years.

KTVU.com: So the solo albums you've done over the last twenty years, all the main studio albums, will be more readily available in the States?

Fish: Yeah, that's right. We're carrying them on the tour, because the entire tour is basically dependent on merchandise. The deal that I had with Snapper [his former record label] has been shot down now. I elected to get my self out of the deal and we made an arrangement where I got my whole catalog back. So basically, I'm carrying a lot of the old Snapper stock and we've got a U.S. t-shirt manufacturer, and we're hinging most of the tour on merchandise sales at the gigs. We've also scheduled meet-and-greets before most of the shows that serve as a kind of a double hit. It gives me a chance to meet a lot of the fans personally that have been kind of holding a torch for us over here for a number of years, and in a commercial sense, it means that we can avoid the 25% commission that the venues put on a lot of the merchandise being sold. We can sell stuff cheaper to the fans at the meet-and-greets, so they can get autographs and we have a lot more of a personal, face-to-face way of dealing with it all.

KTVU.com: It sound like an extension of how you've made your Web site so central to maintaining a direct relationship with your fans while helping fund recording projects by selling official bootlegs and other limited, site-only products…

Fish: The Web site has really been the hub of my career. We're in a situation, like a great deal of other artists, where we can't rely on record companies, especially major record companies. They're obsessed with selling millions of units, and I think they've kind of gotten the formula wrong over the years. I think with people like myself and all the other bands you might call "classic rock" artists who have been putting out albums for a long time are able to keep things going by using the Web site and the mail-order system. When you look at 13th Star, it cost over 60,000 pounds [almost $120,000] to me. If I was going through a normal record company and standard retailers etc, you're looking at earning back like a pound per album you sell.

And you've got to take into account the amount of piracy and downloading going on and the continuing decline in CD sales - something like 25% in the last year. So by selling through the Web site and mail order, the margins are obviously higher, but without those high margins I wouldn't be able to survive and I wouldn't be able to bring in producers like Calum Malcolm. I wouldn't be able to have the session musicians that I work with or provide the kind of quality albums that I want to provide. So the Web site plays a very important part in that and in the communication about this U.S. tour. A lot of the tickets are being sold by word of mouth and the fans mobilizing themselves and contacting each other.

It's great the contact that you have now. When you think about way back in 1982 and '83 when Marillion was first coming across to the States, people were discovering us by buying imported copies of Kerrang! Magazine [a popular U.K. heavy metal/hard rock monthly]. It was word-of-mouth that developed into an underground cult. Now with the Web site, American fans can find out what the set list was in Milan, or find out what happened at the gigs in Warsaw or Stockholm or wherever. There's this great contact. And as somebody like myself who enjoys the communication, who enjoys writing the blogs or going on my MySpace site and providing that information, it's something I find quite inspiring.

KTVU.com: I though it was interesting that you'd your principle songwriting partner on the new album Steve Vantis has been playing bass in your band for over a decade; how did you end up collaborating on this album and why hadn't he come up as a collaborator given his history with you?

Fish: I think there's a number of reasons. Steve's a bass player, and bass players are not well known as being writing partners, apart from your Geddy Lees, Paul McCartneys and Stings. Very few others are involved in one-on-one writing partnerships, they're often part of a unit. Steve had been quite happy being a bass player, there was a lot of live work about, but I think he had gotten to the point in his life where he felt that he had to develop. I had come off the Field of Crows album and tour in 2004 and didn't feel I was ready to go back into the studio. We ended up doing a tour for the 20th anniversary of the Misplaced Childhood album and while I was playing that material that I started to really enjoy that dynamic again, the light and shade of that album. Steve and I were talking about who I was going to bring in as a co-writer, because I didn't really think I had within the ranks at the time [of the band] the co-writer I was looking for. And he said 'Well, I've got a few ideas. Would you be interested?' I was a little bit reticent at first, but then when he brought in about 30 or so bit of music to me in January of last year and I started to go through them, I realized that there were eight or ten pieces that I found interesting. Steve's approach was a lot more modernistic.

It was interesting that I did the Sunsets in Empire album with Steve Wilson of Porcupine Tree in 1997 and that was a major jump forward for me. There was a major change that I knew was necessary in my writing. And it's strange: Steve Wilson had been influenced by the early Marillion years, which was why he was interested in working with me; Steve Vantis was very influenced by bands like Porcupine Tree and Nine Inch Nails. He was bringing a rhythmic approach, which I really loved, and he was bringing in new sounds. Another important thing is when you're working with someone who has a certain level of experience, they can be inflexible and it's sometimes difficult to collaborate. With Steve and I, he respected my experience, I respected his musicality and his technical abilities, so between the two of us there was a good solid understanding. We managed to manipulate the sections of the songs and discover a lot of different approaches that made up the circumstances for 13th Star. There were a lot of other pieces that came into play: having Calum Malcolm come in as producer with his ear for arrangements like he has really complemented Steve and his arrangement sensibilities.

KTVU.com: There's definitely an element of programmed rhythms bordering on industrial that I didn't expect on this album…

Fish: That's what Steve brought into the mix. His influences were really brought to bear, and I was really open to it in very much the same way as when Steve Wilson brought in a heavier guitar sound. So Steve had his loops. He's very handy with computers [laughs]…

KTVU.com: I noticed his credits on the album were really broad. He's the bass player in the band, but he's doing programming, guitars, keyboards…Were you able to essentially lay down the basic bed for these tracks between the two of you?

Fish: Yeah, a lot of the basic sound beds Steve did on his own. I was kind of sitting there saying 'That's right, that's wrong,' but the actual physical work of putting it all down, that was Steve. In the end it doesn't matter who I write with; whatever comes out will sound like a Fish album. Sometimes a musician will come in with 24 bars of a riff, and you've got to cut things down to like eight bars. What I want to do is kind of like an Indonesian rice table. It's better to have a lot of small tastes of things. It keeps you hungry, and you get a taste, but you never get sick of it. And I think that's what Steve and I did with 13th Star. I think that's one of the ways the album does work. There are a lot of intricate melodies, there are a lot of rhythms but you're never there long enough for it to get boring. It's always moving into fresh areas. And again, it was like the light and shades that I wanted to bring in from the Misplaced Childhood performances. I wanted to bring in that dynamic. And it's something we both managed to capture with the new album.

KTVU.com: It was your intense vocal delivery that gave some of Marillion's best songs such emotional resonance. The press materials for 13th Star make mention of the split with your fiancee during the recording sessions just weeks before your planned marriage that could have derailed the album. Instead, you were able to channel your feelings into some of the most powerful songs of your career. Does performing the material live remain something of an emotional exorcism?

Fish: In 2006 when I started to put the lyrical concept together, I came up with the idea about someone who is trapped in life, someone who has retreated from life into this mundane, circular pattern. He's frustrated because he's been badly burned by love. But he goes out and finds it again and embraces it, and lets it wash over him. Then he goes the problems of a new relationship and all the questions that go with it before finally discovering that this latest love is not the right thing for him. But at the end of the day, the very fact that he's gone out in search of love again, even though it's not been the right one, it's propelled him into engaging the world again and to go in search of something. So it's a very positive end to the journey, or the positive start to the next journey.

So the relationship I'd been in had broken up after about a year for various reasons, but probably the most important thing was my willingness to commit to family. And then I went back after about a month and a half or so, and said yeah, I'm willing to do this and asked her to marry me. So we were right in the middle of writing the album and she moved in and she found it very difficult. My studio is my house, my house is my studio. My life is very intense when it comes to working on an album, and she was somebody that demanded a hell of a lot of attention and I was unable to give the kind of attention that she wanted. I had decided to take a far more organized approach to this album. On previous albums, we'd work for four months and write and record simultaneously and throw ideas about. Whereas this was we shall write the album between January and April, at the end of April, a couple of weeks into May we'll get the band together and do preproduction, then Callum Malcolm will come in and we'll do six weeks of recording. It was very disciplined.

So with that kind of discipline you're very locked in. And in the midst of all this writing and recording and preparation I was also putting a wedding together. Landscaping the garden, organizing, you know how planning a wedding is. So just as we started principle recording, which was two days after the invitations were sent out and ten weeks before the actual wedding itself, the woman in question decided she didn't want to get married. She disappeared and I haven't seen her since. It was very traumatic. The choices I had were to lie on the floor and do the 'poor me' bit and just lose myself in the heartache of it all. But the thing was I had a band, I had an album, there was a crew and a tour planned; everything was relying on this. I had to pull myself together and get up on my feet and get moving. What I did was just employ all the emotions - some of them were very dark - within the performances.

And my approach to lyrics has changed. In the old days I'd kind of write a lyric and it would be a full page and that was how it had to go into the song. Now I tend to write in basic verse structures and in bits of middle eights, so a lot of the principle sculpting was all done in the latter stages when we were getting the final skeletons down on the arrangements. A lot of the lyrics were perfected and took on a different kind of meaning and drew on different experiences once the relationship had absolutely exploded. So there was a definitive catharsis that occurred within the music. And as I said Calum Malcolm played a very important part in that he garnered those emotions. He taught me how to use my heart and use my head to get the best performances down on tape that he could.

KTVU.com: As an album with an overarching idea, there's a concept to it, but it doesn't come across as a concept record…

Fish: There is a concept there, if you can find it, but you don't have to find it to like the album. That's what I like about it. There is a storyline, but you don't have to know the storyline to get into the album. It's not an album you put on and you go 'Well, I'll play tracks 3, 6, 8, and 9' or whatever. Once you've heard it and once you get used to listening to it, you listen to it as a whole album. That's why I think I've got a good chance with this album. I think its strong and its very cohesive. And that's rare in these days when so many records are relying two tracks and eight fillers. I don't set out to write a couple of radio-friendly tracks and enough other songs to call it an album; I go out to write an album.

KTVU.com: It seems today that there's definitely wider audience being reached by bands with more progressive and experimental elements to their sound. Do you think modern music fans are more receptive this way?

Fish: I think so. I think rock generally has been kind of hijacked by a very strong commercial element. It's been kidnapped by the MTV crowd. And I think there are a lot of kids out that who think that it's kind of like … Chinese food. It doesn't really satisfy. They want something with a little more depth. It's very much like when Marillion came through during the New Wave of British Heavy Metal, and people wanted something that was a little bit different and had a little more depth. That was one of the keys to the success of the 'Misplaced Childhood' album, because it was a very different album at a time when everyone was following the same routine. If you make a great album, it's not going to be a great album for three months. It's going to be great for a long time as long as you don't pander to the fashions of music.

KTVU.com: As far as the Marillion material that you cover these days, are the songs determined by their popularity or expectations of the fans?

Fish: No, I play them because I want to play them. We're not playing "Kayleigh," "Lavender" or "Heart of Lothian" on this tour. I'm not doing it. I wouldn't say I'm tired of those songs, but I'd say they need a rest. We're playing the material that we're playing because I'm really enjoying it. Frank Usher, our lead guitarist, is playing some of the best guitar he's played in years. Some of the songs [from Fish's final Marillion album Clutching at Straws] like "Last Straw" which was never a particular favorite of mine in 1987, is something I'm really enjoying singing now because it's got a far more kind of Neil Young-type rock groove than we had in the old days. I think that's more through maturity and experience than anything else. I mean, "White Russian" has got a real viciousness to it and even the "Hotel Hobbies" section has a real resonance to it.

KTVU.com: One final thing I wanted to bring up was your recent one-off, one-song reunion with the original members of Marillion. I find it admirable in this era of cash-in reunions that you didn't make a big deal about it and aren't planning a full-blown tour…

Fish: Yeah, and it was also something of a middle finger up to some people who kept on making out that we were sworn enemies or that there was some sort of problem between us. I mean, Mark Kelly is still one of my best, longest-term friends and Ian Mosely and I are longtime, shoulder-to-shoulder buddies. I've got no problem with any of the guys including Steve H [lead singer Steve Hogarth who took Fish's place in the band after his departure]. There's no hassle. I felt it was important to do that, because it's a way to say 'Hey, look. Put your flags down and appreciate that we're just playing music.' This isn't some sort of religious war, and it worked. It did what it was meant to do. It was done in all sincerity and all honesty. It was just five guys, blue-eyed boys, who got their start writing a song called "Market Square Heroes" getting together in the Market Square all those years later, doing one song and walking of the stage and saying 'Yeah, that was cool.' No reunion. Nothing else. There was no radio announcement, there was no press announcement. It was just kept really close and it was fun.

For more information on Fish, visit his official Web site or MySpace page