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By 1980, Tom Waits’ songs were filled with L.A. topography. But just as he’d charted that jungle, his new wife and creative partner, Kathleen Brennan, encouraged him to get lost.

Which isn’t a metaphor; the couple literally had a game called “Let’s Go Get Lost.” Here’s how it worked: “We’d drive into a town, and I would say, ‘But, baby — I know this place like the back of my hand, I can’t get lost,’” Waits later recalled to Uncut. “And she’d say, ‘Oh hell you can’t, turn here, now turn here. Now go back, now turn left, now go right again.’”

In the name of twisted comedy, Brennan would lead him to God-knows-where. Perhaps the journey took them near Fifth St. — Skid Row, or the Nickel, where little boys strayed far from home. Or Sixth Avenue, at the Greyhound bus depot, where he stood forlorn in the midnight wind. Or 18th, where Romeo bled, singing along with the radio with a bullet in his chest.

Brennan would keep up the charade all night, until she called his bluff: “See, I thought you knew this town?”

“Now you’re getting somewhere, now you’re lost. That’s kind of a good metaphor for how we collaborate,” Waits explained to Uncut. Later, he noted, “You find you may not have known how you felt about a particular sound or issue or phrase or melody until you are challenged to expand or change it.”

Waits and Brennan met for the first time in 1980; two months later, they wed. Depending on which account you believe — Waits is the consummate spinner of harebrained yarns — she worked for the circus, had a pilot’s license, or was a nun who found Waits sleeping in church. Allegedly, she “jumped the Grand Canyon with Evil [sic] Knievel and had seven kids from a previous marriage.”

The ostensible reality: They met on the set of the Francis Ford Coppola film One from the Heart, for which Waits wrote the music and Brennan edited the script. Whatever the case, Brennan’s impact on her husband’s life, career and artistry cannot be overstated; they remain equal and parallel creative forces.