"Stare To Hold" isn’t a traditional love song, that’s for sure. Its palpable feeling of longing is clear from the start, but it’s not the tale of a longtime relationship. It’s about one chance meeting with a woman in a bar that just stuck so strongly with the singer.

"Give me a stare I can hold," sings Joshua James on Yellow Paper Planes’ emotive new single. "Give me one reason to lose control."

"'Stare to Hold' is a type of 'one that got away' story, except the subject is a girl I only saw once in a while in a bar I frequented while living in Idaho.  I had the hardest time forgetting about her. I didn't even talk to her that first time I saw her, but there was something so striking that wiggle-wormed its way into my brain and was there hanging out for years even after I left Idaho. 'One that got away' sorta presumes some sort of relationship, but I didn't ever say more than a handful of words to her. There was just something about her. This song is an exorcism of that wiggle worm, I guess," James divulges Myspace.

"The song itself was one of the first I wrote when Yellow Paper Planes first formed. Sometimes songs are fully functioning on the first draft, but it took over a year for us to get 'Stare To Hold' shaped up. It was slow, it was fast, at one point, it had a really long intro. One practice, everyone switched instruments to try to bring it new perspective. We knew there was something there and we wanted to get it figured out, but, man, it was being stiff-necked. For whatever reason, we kept coming back to it and picking at it until finally things started to loosen up and click into place."

Listen to "Stare to Hold" below.