Rich Hinman makes pedal steel music without the twang on 'Memorial'

“Memorial” isn’t a record that Rich Hinman needed to make.

The Salem multi-instrumentalist already has a busy career playing guitar and pedal steel as a sideman for Josh Ritter, Rosanne Cash and Sara Bareilles, not to mention his work teaching at Berklee and through online lessons.

“I love playing other people’s music, but I’ve also always thought of myself, at least in some small sense, as an artist,” says Hinman self-effacingly — he’s made a few prior instrumental recordings, and has an ongoing band with fellow guitarist Adam Levy (called Rich Hinman vs. Adam Levy).

Hinman also admits he found composing new material much harder during the pandemic. But when he was invited to make his own full-length record by LA producer and label owner Pete Min, Hinman discovered that the opportunity to make heavily improvised music “enabled me to write music very quickly, like almost in the moment. And I was really excited because it cleared away a lot of the baggage I had. … It just felt liberating.”

The result is “Memorial,” a gorgeous collection of nine pristine and often surprising original pieces that was released in November by Min’s Colorfield label. Like with many of his labelmates, Hinman’s music might get tagged with the amorphous label of ambient, although it also brings in strong elements of jazz, electronic and even modern classical music.

“Memorial” also continues the current trend of pedal steel players creating sounds that go galaxies beyond the traditional country and Western sound where the instrument has traditionally been found — and which Hinman can currently provide when someone like Marren Morris needs it.

That’s even the case for “Buddy,” which is, at least partially, named after Buddy Emmons, the iconic steel player who was often found playing as a sideman for country artists like the Everly Brothers and Ray Price although he could also play everything from Bach to Count Basie.

“That song was pretty much improvised, and then I added some pump organ,” says Hinman. “And after we recorded it, I was talking to [labelmate] Brad Allen Williams, and he said it was kind of like my 'Blue Jade,’ which is a song Buddy Emmons wrote when he was very young and played his whole life, and it’s more like a hymn than a country tune.”

Hinman says the piece also was influenced by the Celtic and Swedish music he hears in the home he shares with his partner, the prominent fiddler Jenna Moynihan. “It’s like a fiddle tune,” he says – “and also ‘buddy’ is kind of a nickname we sometimes call each other.”

Another track, “The Raising of a Large Barn,” features a string quartet arranged by Williams. Hinman got the idea for the title while reading a book by Vermont's poet laureate Mary Ruefle.

“There's always a lot of little pieces of real life in her poetry, and she wrote a prose poem that references a newspaper clipping, I think from the 19th century, where they talk about someone dying during the raising of a large barn, which is something that used to be a community activity,” says Hinman. “And the song sort of sounds to me like people building something — hammering things and putting things together and pieces of wood falling on the ground off of a ladder.”

A track on “Memorial” that shows the dreamy possibilities of the steel is “Sky Lounge,” which features the saxophone of Daniel Rotem. “Like a lot of these songs, there’s essentially a front half and a back half,” explains Hinman. “The front half will be more of a composition, and then the back half will have more space. Sometimes the composition parts can feel a bit claustrophobic if they go on for too long, because there's lots of chords, and there's lots of movement, so then to have this back half which is just open with two chords is very satisfying to me.”

Because so much of “Memorial” was spontaneously created in the studio, Hinman has had few opportunities to play the material live. But he’s going to be playing a number of the tracks with his new Boston-based trio at the Lizard Lounge on Friday, Dec. 15. He’ll be joined by another recent Boston transplant, drummer Dan Drohan, and his Josh Ritter bandmate, bassist Zachariah Hickman.

“Adapting these songs so they can be played live is really challenging but really fun,” says Hinman, who plans on the set list including some of the holiday favorites he put on his 2022 seasonal release "Christmastown."

After 20 years of making music in New York and then Los Angeles, Hinman says he’s been welcoming the more laid-back atmosphere he’s found since he moved to Boston last year. “It's really cool to be in a town that has plenty of musicians and things going on, but that's not really an industry town,” he says. “LA has, by necessity, an undercurrent of commerce in the music scene, and I appreciate that that doesn’t exist in the same way here. I was working so much in LA with lots of little sessions, and I think that’s part of the reason why I could actually make this record after I had moved away from there.”

Rich Hinman, joined by Zachariah Hickman and Dan Drohan, plays the Lizard Lounge on Friday, Dec. 15.