Wasted

I think I have an idea what this song means. But first, the missing lyrics where the question mark is-

You're seven years old, Got his bat in his hand He's looking for his father And he doesn't understand

In general, I think this song is about wasted lives. For the first verse, aka the first three stanzas here, I think they are stories. The first one about a boy in the hospital, his mom with him, at 2:45 in the morning, and he dies so his dad is called "in the middle of the night." The second stanza would be about a 16 year old who gets in a fatal accident, wrecking his body and the car. The third would then be a man with visceral cancer (a cancer of the soft organs mainly in the abdomen) which he probably never realized he had and then it came on him too fast and killed him in a day.

Those lives were wasted, these people died young and unfairly.

The second set of stanzas I think follows one boy- his dad was always too busy to play with him, his parents wanted their dreams and ideas to be his life, and he doesn't want that at all so when he leaves he just doesn't care about them because they didn't care about what he wanted. Then he gets married and has kids, but he never wanted them either, he based his life on what most people did instead of what he wanted.

Those three stanzas sort of show how his life can be seen as wasteful because he never wanted the life he was in. If he had followed what he really wanted he would have been happier.

I think the third set of stanzas are about the son of the person in the second set of stanzas. The first stanza is the present with the second stanza reflecting his past, and the third him thinking about his future. In the second stanza he is not sure whether following his dreams is going to lead him in the right place, or if that place will exist at all. But, he wants to get out because his dad doesn't care about him. In the first stanza everything is busy and he feels alone, but "Got his life in his hands," so it looks like him following what he wanted was the right thing to do. The third stanza reflects how similar he thinks he is to his dad when he was those ages. He doesn't want to be miserable like his dad was or regret things he did or didn't do, and he doesn't want his life to have been based on principle and what people usually do. He "has a clue" because he knows what he is going to do and he wish his father would have done the same thing, because "She would never be alone in this wasted life." His dad either wasted his mom's life because he never wanted her to begin with, or she would not have been included in his dad's wasted life if he had done what his heart/gut told him to do.

Hence the chorus "We're wasted, no, no, no, we're all wasted."

These lives were wasted by something natural, other people, or themselves, and someone is finally trying to change it so he doesn't waste his life.

Sorry that was so long, and I hope it at least made some sense. I absolutely love this song. It's amazing, and I really like listening to the verses and just thinking about it all.