This was the first single by Toto, a group made up of six very talented session musicians who had backed up artists like Boz Scaggs, Aretha Franklin, Barbra Streisand and Jackson Browne. Written by their keyboard man David Paich with lead vocals by Bobby Kimball. Toto drummer Jeff Porcaro explained: "'Hold the Line' was a perfect example of what people will describe as your heavy metal chord guitar licks and your great triple A-notes on the piano. It was taking the Sly Stone groove and meshing it with a harder rock caveman approach." The saying "Hold the line" has a literal meaning, however, which is how David Paich, keyboards, came up with the title. "Hold the line" is what you tell someone on the phone if you want to put them on hold while you're taking another call. This is typical in workplaces, but in the days before cell phones, some households (especially ones with teenagers) also had multiple phone lines coming in and could put callers on hold. Paich lived in one such household. In a 2015 interview, Paich said: "When I was in high school, all of a sudden the phone started ringing off the hook, and I had a situation where I was at the dinner table and I had three girls all call at the same time, so all the lights were flashing. I was kind of juggling girlfriends, and that's how that came about. It started out with the piano riff that is in the intro. I started playing this riff and I just couldn't stop playing it. I played it for days, and I started singing, "Hold the line, love isn't always on time." It was a phrase that just came into my head. . . . it was a blessing. (The words) came to me in the night, and then I went to the verse. I wrote it in 2 hours. Sometimes songs come quickly like that, and sometimes I spend 2 years trying to finish a song." Most of this song's lyrics start with the words, "It's not." According to David Paich, once he came up with the title, he started writing lines about what love isn't: "It's not in the way you say you're mine," "It's not in the way you say you care."