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One of the cool things about Rodney Crowell is that he gets hot under the collar sometimes. Country musicians are, as a rule, a mannerly, conservative lot, eager to smile, sing the familiar hits, and get back on the tour bus. Not our Rodney. ''This stuff you hear in Nashville all the time, industry people who'll say to you, 'Don't offend anybody,' like if you make music that doesn't sound like everything else on the radio that your music is somehow 'offensive'-that pisses me off,'' says Crowell, sitting in a Nashville recording studio. ''I mean, what is the job of an artist except to throw a big wad of red paint on the wall and see who it jars?'' Crowell's latest version of red paint on the wall is a frequently lovely, often ornery album called Life Is Messy (Columbia), which has already yielded the top 10 country-chart hit ''Lovin' All Night.'' You might know the Texas-born singer-songwriter best from his 1988 album, Diamonds & Dirt, or from the hits he has written for others, including Bob Seger's ''Shame on the Moon'' and Waylon Jennings' ''Ain't Livin' Long Like This.'' Crowell, 41, has also produced all of singer Rosanne Cash's hit songs, even as the pair conducted a 12-year marriage, which resulted in three children and lots of autobiographical music, including Cash's shattering album-length portrait of their breakup, 1991's critically acclaimed commercial flop, Interiors. ''Interiors was the only album of Rosie's I didn't produce, and I think it's the one that captures her most completely,'' he says. ''I was amazed the album didn't sell better. I said to myself, 'Don't people want to hear the truth?''' The truth is something Crowell has also striven for on Life Is Messy. In addition to the rueful title song (''Life is messy/It's trying to depress me''), there are rollicking, romantic country-rock tunes like ''It Don't Get Better Than This'' and ''Let's Make Trouble''; Linda Ronstadt, Don Henley, and Steve Winwood pop up as cameo voices. And there's a number about his split with Cash, an achingly beautiful song called ''Alone But Not Alone'' that sounds like a lost Roy Orbison classic. As has been true since he released his first album in 1978, Crowell creates songs that tackle classic country themes-lovin', leavin', and honky- tonkin'-without the musical and verbal cliches. ''I admire people like Lyle Lovett, k.d. lang, Steve Earle-people who've stretched the idea of what a country artist is. But I also know what they have in common: They've had to leave country music because they weren't being played on country radio, because the industry alienated them. Maybe I'll get lucky and continue to succeed doing the kind of music that's important and personal to me, but it would be strictly luck.'' Ask him about the mass-audience explosion that Garth mania has touched off in country music and Crowell is blunt: ''I hear an explosion in the media, but I don't hear any big creative noise in country right now; I don't hear any Bob Dylans out there, rewriting the rules.'' Crowell's inspirations while making Life Is Messy are off the beaten country path: ''Miles Davis-I was listening to records of his like Birth of the Cool, Kind of Blue, Sketches of Spain. And Frank Sinatra-I had a major obsession going with In the Wee Small Hours. I was loving all this jazz music, this pop singing, but I couldn't figure out how it was supposed to help me in making my own music. I wasn't going to make a jazz record, you know? ''Then I realized that what I was into was the atmosphere and the poignancy in those albums-I didn't have to play jazz chords; it was a feeling I was after. So I set out on a pilgrimage to find some new moods, some new voicings, in my music.'' If you see Crowell on tour all over the country later this summer, you'll hear him and his band, the New Spirit Review, playing not just his own hits, but also rockabillied versions of oldies like ''Tobacco Road,'' ''I Hear You Knockin','' and ''Respect Yourself.'' ''I'm just trying to expand,'' he says, ''to get deeper in what I do.''
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