Between ther well-crafted tunes and their homemade preserves, Sunparlour Players know how to satisfy their fans.

To a select segment of especially ravenous fans, Ontario roots-rock trio the Sunparlour Players has become synonymous with the homemade preserves available on its merch table. It might sound silly, but when the band members showed up for the first few shows of their summer 2009 tour, they were greeted by a chorus of disappointment that they hadn’t packed any of their trademark “Handsome Strong” mustard.

“We caught hellfire,” says frontman Andrew Penner. “Our fans were vocal that it would not stand! We heard them and took it under advisement, so now we have a huge stockpile of mustard, sweet pepper spread and our latest preserve, beet jelly.”

Thankfully, as tasty as these canned condiments are, the band’s live performances provide a veritable buffet as well. With all three members — Penner, Dennis Van Dine and Michael “Rosie” Rosenthal — capable of playing a grab bag of instruments, they each set up behind a one-man-band-style station including bells strapped to boots and a kick drum for each Player. On top of this percussive propulsion, the group switches between guitar, banjo, accordion and other tools of the twangy trade.

“Somebody did a count recently, and for this tour we’ve got 16 instruments onstage,” Penner says with a laugh. “We use them all, and it doesn’t feel like a gimmick in any way. We just want to make the palette as big as we can and have a lot of fun. When you’re playing three instruments at the same time, naturally you have to streamline and boil it down to the essence. Plus, we’re all drummers, so it just feels right to stomp on something and make a loud boom.”

For the recording of the band’s latest album, Wave North, the Players tried out some equally tricky techniques. Splitting its time between Blue Rodeo’s Woodshed Studio and the self-proclaimed “junkshop” of fellow Eastern Canadian alt-country troupe The FemBots, the Players finally fussed up its songs with a choir, horn section and strings at Toronto’s Factory Theatre. Nonetheless, Penner says the sessions were defined by the oddball doodads built by “junkstrument” artist and FemBots co-conspirator Iner Souster.

“We were using microphones that he had built out of old dishpans and just trying to experiment with how to catch sound,” explains Penner. “There were lots of unrelated accidents as well, like somebody leaving a snare on while we were doing a vibraphone take. We realized the whole vibes sound had a distorted snare sizzle and ending up loving it, so then we miked our snare through an old telephone. The recording process had a theme of building things up and then tearing them down, which is funny because I think the album has a huge, beautiful sheen to it as well.”

Getting back to the business of preserves, Penner and company have recently teamed up with Canadian home canning business Bernardin for a unique partnership that grants them as many free food containers as they can fill and sell.

“The president came to one of our shows this summer, and a week later we ended up in a meeting,” says Penner. “They seem to be doing some good stuff like promoting locally grown foods and preserving, but also working with homeless shelters and ‘out of the cold’ charities for the wintertime. As a band, we had been looking for ways to mix things up and get more involved, and this seemed like a perfect marriage of things we were already doing and things we can stand behind. So far the relationship is pretty chill: They give us free cans and we do what we do anyway.”