[toyboy]

Apologies if my thoughts are scattered:

• God spelled backwards is dog. I think it's T's intention that God is the second song and Space Dog the penultimate.
• This regard for structure and cohesion may or may not be reflected in the first and last lines: "Way to go"/"And now those girls are gone"
• The beginning sounds like muffled boots marching through a snow-covered ground.
• In the second verse, there's a string-like sound that's positively eerie (there's no strings listed in the instruments credit, so maybe it's the Something by Rantz and Zane).
• I found out the Russian connection of this song from Jim (thanks Jim!) — hope he'll share his thoughts here; in fact, words like rain, snow, commander, colonel, engines, lines secure do evoke Russia and the militaristic for me. Which makes Space Dog's preceding Yes, Anastasia somewhat fitting.
• The songs have two parts that alternate with each other: one part, comprising the verses, have a lot of instruments, while the other very distinctively features only Tori and piano.
• The "So sure those girls now are in the Navy" lines sound like they're sung by a Greek chorus. There's definitely more than one Tori voice, I think.
• "Our minds make stories, and stories make our minds. Each culture's Make-a-Human kit is built from stories, and maintained by stories. A story can be a rule for living according to one's culture, a useful survival trick, a clue to the grandeur of the universe, or a mental hypothesis about what might happen if we pursue a particular course. Stories map out the phase space of existence." — Terry Pratchett
  
  Two things about stories: they are well-ordered, with a beginning, a middle, and an end; and they can help us make sense of the world. And if it's a story about a turtle race, there's a clear start with a win at the finishing line. If only our lives were that straightforward. In Space Dog, life clearly isn't, and the girl doesn't seem to know what to do with it other than escaping/coping through stories of militaristic adventures, where she assumes these multiple girls going on exciting missions in a world full of secret societies, colonels, and commanders.
  
  I like how the bridge comes in and breaks the fiction by introducing Christmas ("Deck the halls"), a time when families tend to gather together and catch up with one another, when stories of one's life, recent achievements, disappointments, can be shared, when things tend to get compared, and here we find she still hasn't gotten her life in order from what appears like overheard whispered gossip ("Is she still pissing in the river, now/Heard she’d gone moved into a trailer park"). Maybe successive failures, maybe just not having found what she wants, but she's definitely not the grapefruit winning.
  
  In the end, only when she gives up her multiples selves in all the stories ("And now those girls are gone"), does she really, finally confront the stark reality of her life, what's really happening, and while the first chorus most likely refers to one of her story girls, just touching down from a flight mission that proved futile ("So sure we were on something"), the last implies that she is finally grounded to her situation ("Your feet are just on the ground").

All her talks about primitive cave drawings, lemon pie boy, Patti Smith, are likely relevant, but I thought of this without realizing they're all collected in yessaid and now it's too late to do research. If my interpretation doesn't seem valid, well, IT'S MINE!!! And it's late into midnight and still not yet dawn so I may've typed this out in sentences that may've been less unclear had I an eternity for the thread. And then, maybe not. I wish I had spent more time on this. Thanks!

Lyrics
Liner notes
Tori talks