In the beginning, there was the chewing gum, a small piece that singer Nina Simone had taken out of her mouth and placed atop her Steinway piano in a London concert hall in 1999.

Warren Ellis, a member of Nick Cave’s band the Bad Seeds, saw her do it, and as Simone left the stage at the end of a transformative performance, Ellis made his move.

“Warren was crawling up onto the stage, looking possessed and heading for the Steinway,” Cave writes in the introduction to Ellis’s new book, titled simply, “Nina Simone’s Gum.”

More than two decades later, Ellis admits he really didn’t know what he was doing, or why, at the time.

“I never even asked myself why I took it,” he says in a recent video call from Asheville, North Carolina, where he and Cave were about to kick off a United States tour that includes shows in Los Angeles at the Shrine Auditorium on Wednesday, March 9, and the Orpheum Theatre on Thursday, March 10.

“That was the thing people kept asking me when they found out that I had it: ‘Why did you take it?’” he says. “And in all truth, I didn’t have an answer. It was something I wanted to have. I wanted something connected to her.

“But beyond that, it was something that reminded me of that evening, of that transformation I saw,” Ellis continues. “To be in the presence of somebody touched by the hand of God. I just wanted something beyond my memory.”

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The book arrived in October right as Cage and Ellis finished a European tour behind their 2021 album “Carnage,” their first (other than soundtracks) as a duo, and “Ghosteen,” Cave and the Bad Seed’s 2019 release for which the pandemic scuttled tour plans.

“It’s sort of the same lineup as we had in Europe,” Ellis says of the U.S. shows, which in addition to him and Cave includes multi-instrumentalist Luis Almau and four singers. “But we’ve been rehearsing other songs now for this.

“It’s a very powerful show, really, a beautiful show.”

Power of the gum

Ellis laughs as he acknowledges “the kind of perversity” of writing a book inspired by a 23-year-old piece of chewing gum. For most of that time, he’d kept it wrapped in a hand towel Simone also left on the piano and stuffed inside a red-and-yellow Tower Records bag.

“Sometimes even writing it, I’d sort of pinch myself and go, ‘I’m writing about a piece of chewing gum,’” he says. “Then I realized what I was writing about, these exchanges with people, and things like that.

“And actually, what we’re talking about is a thing that’s so kind of amazing and beautiful,” Ellis says.

“Nina Simone’s Gum” is a little bit memoir, but a lot more a meditation on the power of creativity and the magic of inspiration.

To Ellis, the gum was a talisman, a holy relic, in which the spirit of Simone lingered. Others – a jewelry maker, a music curator, the staff at his publisher – felt a similar power in its presence, he writes.

“I had this sort of feeling of this incredible love and care that was gathering underneath it,” Ellis says. “I could see it was sort of a metaphor for ideas, and a metaphor for people projecting their better souls onto something.”

No one really knew about the gum until he mentioned it in the 2014 Nick Cave documentary, “20,000 Days on Earth,” after which Ellis says the idea of Nina Simone’s gum “seemed to shift and become something else.”

In 2019, as Cave began collecting artifacts for Stranger Than Kindness, a museum exhibit in Copenhagen, he asked Ellis if he had anything that might work.

“I said, ‘Look, I’ve got the gum,’” Ellis says. “He’s like, ‘That’s exactly what this exhibition is about. We’d love it.’

“That’s when it became something,” he says of his decision to send the gum into the world. “When I felt what people brought to it, when they care.

“That continues to this day.”

Making music

Ellis, who grew up in Australia playing mostly the violin and flute, joined the Bad Seeds about 25 years ago. On “Carnage” he played those instruments and also everything from tenor guitar and harmonium to autoharp and glockenspiel.

In time, he and Cave came to be close collaborators, first as composers of scores for films such as “The Road” and “Hell or High Water,” but eventually on albums with the Bad Seeds, too.

Starting with 2013’s “Push The Sky Away,” Cave and Ellis have been credited as the sole composers of music for Bad Seeds albums. (“Carnage” might have been a Bad Seeds album, too, Ellis says, but for the difficulties of getting the entire band together during the pandemic.)

“I think Nick realized he could write a certain sort of song sitting on his own at the piano,” Ellis says. “But I think he wanted to open up his own style of writing as well, and we had this kind of collaboration already in place with the scores.

“The last couple of records, like ‘Ghosteen’ in particular, and ‘Skeleton Tree,’ we worked really closely together,” he says.

Both of those albums are beautiful if sometimes difficult listens, the lyrics written as Cave struggled with subjects such as life, love and loss in the aftermath of his teenage son Arthur’s death.

“If I engaged in the making of the music the same way that I do in the listening of other music, I wouldn’t be able to do my job,” Ellis says of writing and recording songs of grief and sorrow. “‘Skeleton Tree’ was an incredibly difficult record to make.

“Nick’s son had died,” he says. “It was raw. He wanted to try and make a record, so in a way, you have to kind of honor that.”

The Skeleton Tree tour, though, showed Ellis that his friend was finding his strength again.

“What was amazing was watching Nick just kind of transform,” he says. “You could see him almost being saved by his own songs.

“It was extraordinary to watch.”

Love and letting go

The first few years Ellis had the gum, he kept it in his briefcase, taking it on tour and anywhere he traveled.

Even now that he’s given it up, it’s still with him in a way: While talking on the video call, he pulls the chain around his neck free of his shirt and displays a ring he had made on which is fixed a silver replica of Nina Simone’s gum.

The Stranger Than Kindness exhibit is scheduled to open in Montreal in April, and despite the concerns of curators in both Copenhagen and Montreal that the gum might be damaged or lost, and so should be replaced with a replica, the original will continue to be shown.

“I said, ‘Well you can’t make copies because it’s not fair,’” Ellis says of the suggestion that the gum be locked away and a stand-in placed atop the marble plinth in the exhibit. “People have got to be in front of the real thing.

“You don’t want to see a replica of Kurt Cobain’s cardigan,” he says. “You don’t want to see a replica of Jimi Hendrix’s burnt guitar. You want to see the real thing.”

Even after he finished the book, the serendipity of the gum and its influence on the imagination continues.

“The day I handed the draft in and they said, ‘That’s it, you’re done,’ I went to clean out my mother-in-law’s apartment because she can’t come to Paris anymore,” Ellis says.

There he found an old Samsonite suitcase he’d used on tour decades ago, and in it such memories as his old address book, a script from Oren Moverman, who advised him on writing the book, letters from friends such as Mick Geyer, who’d attended the Simone concert with him, and David McComb, who’d helped him maintain his sobriety.

And one more long-forgotten memory, too.

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“I found the ticket to the concert of Nina Simone,” Ellis says. “My actual ticket with my name on it. And for me, it was like a sign.

“That they were all saying, ‘Let it go, kid; you’ve done what you can with it,’” he says.

In a way, that’s what the book is about, Ellis says.

“It’s about letting things go and letting ideas take flight,” he says. “Letting them get out in the world.

“Because without other people, they don’t exist.”