When Jonathan Krauth and Michelle Allan began filming music videos with local bands, the presence of their green couch starred as a reoccurring prop.

The unique piece of furniture quickly became the basis for the Green Couch Sessions, a series of performances shot first in their living room, then in various locations around Vancouver.

The next step in that progression, they explained, was taking the couch on the road—or more specifically, the train tracks.

In an idea that hatched with a tweet to VIA Rail and quickly progressed to a full-blown documentary project, the pair will be boarding a train on Friday (June 8) from Vancouver with 10 bands. Their footage of the musical performances that occur during the four-day trip to Toronto will form the basis of a documentary called Tracks on Tracks.

“We feel like that was the next move,” Allan said during an interview with the Georgia Straight on the infamous green couch at a Granville Island park.

“It was like out of the living room, now we’re taking them all over the place, now we need to take it outside of Vancouver—we need to put the couch by some buffalos in Saskatchewan.”

The bands that were selected by Green Couch to take part in the journey are Adaline, Bear Mountain, The Belle Game, The Matinée, Maurice, Portage and Main, and Top Less Gay Love Tekno Party.

Another three acts, Calgary group Sidney York, Victoria singer Chris Ho and Shred Kelly of Fernie, were chosen by CBC Radio 3 listeners in a vote that initially included over 200 Western-Canadian nominated bands, according to Grant Lawrence, who will be joining the trip and producing podcasts from the train.

Vancouver musicians Zach Gray from the Zolas and Adrian Glynn will also be making appearances on the train, Allan said.

The concept is a throwback to Festival Express, the documentary that was made decades after footage was collected of musical legends including the Band, the Grateful Dead and Janis Joplin as they crossed Canada by train in 1970.

“We’ve all at one time or another watched the Festival Express, and so there’s that romanticized idea, about all of us musicians just jamming and having some fun on the train,” said Matt Layzell of The Matinée.

“I envision some of that, probably minus a lot of the hallucinogenics.”

Layzell said while the journey will be the first time the Vancouver roots band has crossed the country by train, his group did spend some time walking the tracks in Ontario in the wake of an unfortunate tour van incident.

“We had a van that was really problematic and we were in northern Ontario, and it caught on fire, and yeah we slept in a Canadian Tire parking lot, hoping they’d fix it in the morning, and instead they called the cops on us and had our van towed away from the only shop in town,” he told the Straight by phone. “So we walked the train tracks through town to find another auto mechanic.”

The band has spent a lot of hours in tour vans around the country—something that Layzell said Vancouver bands are well accustomed to.

“I think a lot of bands in Vancouver feel trapped—you’ve got the ominous Rockies blocking us in, and no one west of Ontario seems to really care much about what happens here, so to make your mark as a band, you have to go out there and tour, and you have to do a lot of hours in the van,” he said. “But it’s hard to build your name, and it’s hard to build a buzz, because there’s so many people doing it.”

According to Lawrence, those physical hurdles have always posed a challenge for Canadian bands trying to build an audience outside their own region.

“Bands from this country face massive geographic barriers, and they existed since the days of the Guess Who and everybody else, and I think that bands just continue to figure out ways around it,” the CBC Radio 3 host told the Straight by phone. “I think one of the keys to cross that hurdle of getting the music outside of the province is to be creative.”

That’s where an idea like Tracks on Tracks comes in, Lawrence indicated.

The journey will consist of impromptu, busker-style performances on train platforms in stops like Jasper, a longer show in Winnipeg, and will culminate in a Tracks on Tracks showcase at NXNE in Toronto. Footage of the performances will be posted along the way.

“Throughout the trip, we’re going to have behind-the-scenes footage going up daily, recordings of sessions, MP3s that people can download, and also session-style videos like we have and tons of pictures,” said Krauth.

A central focus of the project will be the musical collaborations that occur during the journey. With the eclectic mix of musical genres included in the line-up, the jams should produce some memorable results.

“I think really interesting collaborations will come out of it for sure—that’s my favourite part of it actually,” Adaline, otherwise known as Shawna Beesley, told the Straight by phone.

“There’s me and like the guys in Top Less Gay Love Tekno Party are probably the more like synth-heavy acts, and I’m sure that we’ll be throwing in a few banjos in our set or something,” she said. “We’ll find ways to mix it up.”

The Tracks on Tracks organizers consciously chose up-and-coming groups to showcase the emerging scene in the region, noted Allan.

“I think we have a good range of artists, and for us…we tried to pick the artists that we really feel are like the next sort of coming of Canadian music, at least from Vancouver,” she said.

Lawrence predicted the bands will be among the next groups that will break through on a national level, highlighting acts including the Matinée, folk-rock band Portage and Main, and electro-pop musicians Top Less Gay Love Tekno Party.

He noted a “wave” of local bands surged in popularity a couple of years ago, such as the New Pornographers, Destroyer and Black Mountain. That was followed more recently, he added, by a new crop of “more introspective pop” acts that have seen a lot of success, including Hannah Georgas, Said the Whale, and Dan Mangan.

“Now they’ve got to a certain degree of fame and have moved on to a certain new level, and now I think with Tracks on Tracks, we’re seeing kind of the next generation of the bands that I think will become pretty big,” he said.

Allan jokingly describes Top Less Gay Love Tekno Party as the “dark horse” of the trip, in that they are still relatively unknown outside Vancouver and Toronto.

Yet despite the fact they have yet to release their record, the band has consistently filled venues in Vancouver.

Band member Michael Schindler guesses that has something to do with the group’s focus on unique, visually interesting live music. Some of the elements of their shows include glitter guns and silver spacesuit costumes.

“I find it so strange that more bands don’t have this attitude, but we just have this total [attitude of] give the people that have paid money for your shows a real shit-kicker kind of, like glitter, sweaty, sexy, crazy party,” he said. “And if you’re not doing that, what the hell are you doing?”

Their on-board show will be paired down to a more basic electro-acoustic set, he noted, featuring among other instruments some synths and a ukulele.

Vancouver band The Belle Game is also planning to perform a more scaled-down version of their up to eight-member line-up.

“We’re hoping definitely to collaborate while we’re on the train, and I know one of the bands that is coming, Sidney York and her band, she plays French horn and there’s like an oboe and a bassoon that play with her as well, so we’re in talks to have some replacement brass and woodwinds going on,” said band member Katrina Jones.

“I think that’s going to be one of the cool things about the project—it’s like band survival, like work with the bare minimum, but you can help each other out,” added Belle Game member Adam Nanji. “So I think there’ll be…a lot of collaborations.”

Another interesting element of the train journey could be the factor of unsuspecting tourists on the four-day train trip, Lawrence noted. Aside from the bands, an eight-person crew, some ticket-winners and fans that paid that join the trip, the train will be a regular public cross-country journey.

“There’s going to be a bunch of other people that have bought tickets to this train, and have no idea what’s going on,” he said. “At the same time, there’s going to be a bunch of bands on the train. So I’m interested to see how the performances go over.”

The train leaves Vancouver on June 8 and arrives in Toronto on June 12. Videos and updates from the journey will be posted on the Tracks on Tracks website.

Top Less Gay Love Tekno Party play Club 560 and Adaline plays the Biltmore tonight (June 7).