Q&A: Jenna Fournier on Kid Tigrrr project, One Night Live, touring with Billy Corgan

A one-of-a-kind partnership means Jenna Fournier will be able to take her Kid Tigrrr project out on tour.

“I wouldn’t be on the road if it weren’t for them right now,” Fournier said last week.

The One Night Live tour features a collaboration among Live Music Society, D-TOUR and Cleveland Rocks: Past, Present & Future to support independent artists and venues.

Fournier will headline the tour, which starts Nov. 5 in Washington and runs through Nov. 16 in Detroit. The tour stops at Brillobox in Pittsburgh’s Bloomfield neighborhood on Nov. 6, with locals Princess Nostalgia and Mégane opening the show.

Kid Tigrrr is Fournier’s solo project, blending dream pop and art rock. Her album, “Stoned + Animald,” was released by the Martha’s Music label, which is run by Billy Corgan of the Smashing Pumpkins. Fournier, who also plays in Niights, has also toured with Billy Corgan and the Machines of God, including a stop at the Roxian Theatre this summer.

In a call from Cleveland, Fournier spoke with TribLive about touring, Kid Tigrrr, covering “Tonight, Tonight” by the Smashing Pumpkins and more. Find a transcript of the conversation, edited for clarity and length, below.

How did you get involved in the One Night Live project?

I got involved in One Night Live through Cleveland’s incubator program and through D-TOUR. One of the founders of D-TOUR is a Cleveland venue owner. He owns the Happy Dog, which my partner and bandmate in Niights actually runs sound at. We love the Happy Dog, so we love Sean (Watterson) and everything he does for our city. And Cindy (Barber) is the owner of the Beachland. I was part of her nonprofit, Cleveland Rocks: Past, Present and Future. I was in their incubator program in 2024. They asked me if it would be something I was interested in. I said, of course.

How did you help to shape this tour then?

Shaping the tour, it’s been definitely a team effort. I don’t take a whole lot of credit there, but I helped pick out some of the venues, suggested where it would make sense for me to go based on where I’ve toured before, specifically following the Machines of God tour that just did a Midwest regional area. We hit some of those cities again, we hit some of the cities I’ve played before with my band Niights and tried to stay where I might know some people or have some friends or family or people that are already interested in the music. I selected some of the openers myself, did some research there and then picked some friends there. So I did have a say in some of who will be playing the shows. I designed the tour flyers, so that’s something. But we have someone that’s helping with a lot of the graphic stuff and doing a lot of the legwork there on the team.

Is it fun to play or is it scary to play a new place?

Yeah, it’s fun. I trust that the team knows what they’re doing. It was sort of short notice, getting everything going, we didn’t have as much time as maybe we would have liked to have on this particular one, just because I was caught up on tour this summer. So I trust that they picked some cool places, but you always know on tour, you might end up in a place that, you just never know, doesn’t have a door on the bathroom. I played a place once that had the monitor coming out the side of the stage so there was just vocal feedback the whole time. You might get one per tour that’s just something’s not right. It’s to be expected. We’re all learning as we go.

What do you see as the biggest challenges as a touring musician?

Some of the biggest challenges as a touring musician are definitely coming up with, well, it’s not losing money on tour. If you want to market the tour, if you want to make merch for the tour, and then you start adding in gas and tolls and lodging, it’s really hard to recoup all of that. I know personally a lot of bands that are happy just to break even on tours like this. It’s a weird time in music to make money from music, period, even if you have a lot of people streaming your music and listening to your work.

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What’s your take on the price of concert tickets? You could probably see from both sides as a musician and as a fan.

Yeah, and everything has gone up since the pandemic. As the world’s gotten more expensive for everyone, not only can fans and audiences not afford pricey concert tickets, but they’re taking the hit alongside the artist and alongside the venues. So nobody’s winning here, right?

When you first started touring, was it a trial by fire of trying to figure this kind of stuff out? Did you have any idea of the business, the economics behind touring?

When I first started touring, I had no idea, no. And I was in my early 20s, and I was happy to play for $10 and a couple of T-shirt sales and a six-pack of PBR. I was happy to sleep in a van with four other dirty people. There’s a time in your life you can do things like that and still get on stage and play. For me personally, just getting a little bit older, if I don’t have a good night’s sleep, at least every other night, and a shower every other day, I’m going to be pretty crabby on the road and I’m not as interested in doing it. And learning the hard way, of course, that sometimes you just lose money for several nights in a row, I guess it’s discouraging to tour when you’re just losing money.

How different is touring as Kid Tigrrr or Niights compared to what you got to do this summer with Billy Corgan & the Machines of God? A big difference?

I would say night and day. Billy Corgan, of course, has a massive audience and a very supportive fan base. Even the Machines of God tour for him was significantly smaller venues than what he would be playing with Smashing Pumpkins. Touring on a bus is a different thing than putting four adults in a minivan and hitting the road with their gear in the backseat. This is actually the first tour that I’ve done as Kid Tigrrr. So it’s really hard to say, but I am going out on the road with two of the guys that are in Niights with me. One of them is playing with me, and the other one’s driving and tour managing and stuff like that so we’re not strangers. If you have good people with you, things can be a little cozier and you can rough it a little more if you enjoy your company, right?

What have been your goals with this Kid Tigrrr project?

The main goal for the Kid Tigrrr project was actually just to learn how to produce my music from home. I started the solo project in the pandemic after I split from my label. When I was with the record label with Niights, I wasn’t allowed to put solo music out. Everything had to go through the label, and I was very band focused. So when we parted ways with the label in 2020, I was quite isolated, spending a lot of time home alone, that’s when I decided some of these solo songs in the back catalog were going to get recorded. I wanted to learn how to record and produce from home. So that was the main goal of it. Now that that record is done, I want to go out and promote it a little bit and put this project in front of people and just turn them on to the music. For me, the point of touring is to share what’s been made and hopefully some of these people will come back and listen when I make another one.

With “Stoned + Animald,” do you think you hit the mark of what you wanted to do?

Yes and no. I hit a wall with it where I was really struggling to just get it over the finish line, and I was getting frustrated. The record was a couple years in the making because I was learning how to use the software and I was learning audio engineering and tricks and techniques as I went along. So it was a very experimental album. I don’t know if I’ll make something quite that experimental again, maybe. For me, I can hear the learning as I go in the record, the moments of the record where someone’s like, ‘Oh, wow, I figured out that I can do this little trick. I’m going to use that all over this song, right?’ So I hear the learning in it.

Did I hit the mark? In a sense of thematically, it was very much a mental health and healing record and some of the themes that I explored, I hoped that they would connect and make an impact. In a lot of ways they did, so I would say I hit the mark there. Sonically, I ended up taking it into a studio. We added live drums, we retracked some stuff, and we made it a more polished record than I meant for it to be, which is OK. In a lot of ways, I think the fact that it’s kind of glossy has made it more accessible to people, but I was really just looking to make a lo-fi bedroom pop record. So it didn’t come out the way I pictured. But in some ways, it came out better than I imagined. But moving forward, I think I’m still going to aim for a lo-fi bedroom pop record. (laughs) And maybe this time I will finish it not in a studio and it won’t get so shiny.

What’s the meaning behind the album title?

“Stoned + Animald” is a reference to stoning, like being judged, throwing stones. I had just covered Bob Dylan’s “Rainy Day Women” for a charity project. (sings) “Everybody must get stoned,” if you don’t know the song, right? The song is kind of fun, but he talks about stoning in a way, the biblical reference of being stoned and being judged. So that’s how I meant stoned to tie in. And Animald is about your animal instinct, sort of feeling caged. It’s very much in theme with what the record is about as far as losing yourself, being in survival mode, and as an artist feeling like people are misunderstanding you and judging you and throwing stones at you while you’re just trying to survive.

With the cover of “Tonight, Tonight,” can you tell me the story behind that one? How different was it to play your version versus when it was just you and Billy during the summer tour?

(Corgan) had asked me about doing that cover for what may end up being a podcast song. So he actually suggested that I cover that. I did a couple different versions before I landed on that one. At first, I was trying to do a version that sounded like the Smashing Pumpkins version but my voice, and that was a total failure. I remember saying to him finally, it dawned on me, that maybe you asked me to do this because you wanted me to put my own voice into it. So I completely scrapped everything I was working on. I just did it the way that I wanted to and interpreted the song in my own way. It came out the way it came out. It’s really sort of soft and it doesn’t have the big epic quality, but it’s my own thing. It didn’t end up making it for the podcast theme song. But we thought, well, if you’re gonna put my vinyl out, why don’t we include this as a bonus track. And I’ve played it live a few times. On the tour, I sort of just backed him up, which was awesome. He let me sing a little bit on the tour. It’s a special song. People really connect to that one, so it was special.