Kevin Griffin, the frontman and songwriter for the Louisiana rock band Better Than Ezra, is a busy guy these days.

Griffin has been working with collaborators in Nashville, Tenn., trying to come up with tunes that country music's biggest stars might deem worthy of recording.

He's also been squirreling away songs for the next Ezra project, with the aim of having a new album out in the fall.

And he's been working with Ed Roland, the frontman for the Georgia rock band Collective Soul, with whom he's been touring as the Southern Gentlemen.

The two musicians, who perform as an acoustic duo, will play Friday, Feb. 24, at the Chameleon Club in downtown Lancaster. The two men were scheduled to play the Chameleon on Oct. 29 but a freak snowstorm forced the show's cancellation.

Griffin said the collaboration has proven fruitful onstage and will now move into the studio. He said they hope to begin recording in the spring with producer Paul Worley (Lady Antebellum, the Band Perry).

"It all happened really naturally," Griffin said during a telephone interview from Nashville. "We thought it would be fun to change it up and get on the road and play each other's songs. We've known each other a long time and we found when we got onstage together we just had a real great rapport. I'll sing some Collective Soul songs, he'll do some Ezra songs and we'll do some fun covers."

Collective Soul has sold more than 11 million albums on the strength of hit songs like "December," "Precious Declaration" and "Heavy," and Better Than Ezra has sold more than 4 million albums, powered by tunes like "Good," "Desperately Wanting" and "King of New Orleans."

Though the bands have been commercially successful, neither has gotten much love from critics. The bands also are somewhat faceless, with none of the members making much of an impression on the music-buying public, something that became clear to Griffin and Roland when they began touring together.

"We pushed the tour as the Southern Gentleman Tour, and then you see our names, and then, in real small letters, you see the bands we're from," Griffin said. "And we realized, you know, that no one knows our names in the scheme of things, so we needed to get the band's names in bigger letters."

Griffin said he's been writing with various collaborators in Nashville, hoping to catch the attention of artists like Keith Urban and Kenny Chesney. He said both are actively looking for songs because they're getting ready to record albums.

"More times than not, you write a great song and then it gets put in a pile with all the other songwriters and it never gets cut," he said.

Lightning, however, sometimes does strike.

It did for Griffin when he and songwriter Shy Carter were collaborating in Los Angeles and came up with an idea for a song that Griffin believed would be perfect for the country duo Sugarland, which consists of Jennifer Nettles and Kristian Bush.

"I said, 'Oh my gosh, let me hit up Kristian Bush,' because I know him," Griffin said. "I called him and said, 'Are you done with your album?' He said, 'We're looking for two more songs, a single and an album track.' I said, 'Hey, I think we may have started a song that could be a single for you guys.'

"We got on Skype — Jennifer and Kristian and me and Shy — and we, in short order, finished 'Stuck Like Glue.'\!p"

"Stuck Like Glue," which is on Sugarland's album "The Incredible Machine," turned into a huge smash, selling about 1.8 million copies.

"I'm glad my mind was putting one and one together when we started writing that one," Griffin said.

The Southern Gentlemen will perform an all-ages show at 7 p.m. Friday, Feb. 24, at the Chameleon Club on North Water Street in downtown Lancaster. For ticket information, visit chameleonclub.net.

jferguson@lnpnews.com