Cole Cuchna

So much like their collaboration with Nile Rodgers, working directly with Paul Williams represents another remarkable full-circle moment for Daft Punk.

They aren't simply paying homage to one of their heroes, they're actively extending his legacy, introducing a new generation of listeners to an artist whose work helped influence their own creative vision.

Now like they did with all their collaborators on this album, when Tomas and Guimond brought Williams into the studio, they shared with him their vision of the song that became Touch.

Here is Williams himself telling this story.

In another interview, Williams said Daft Punk gave him a book about people with life after death experiences, where people died and came back to life.

And so, understanding this backstory of an unidentified entity awakening from an unconscious state, the introduction of touch seems to inhabit that liminal otherworldly space between sleep and wakefulness, or perhaps even life and death, as our narrator slowly emerges into consciousness.

After being pulled through that vortex of consciousness, Paul Williams' natural voice enters the track, singing from the perspective of an unnamed supernatural entity.

One we can pretty safely assume is the same robotic figure we've been following throughout the album.

He opens with the lines, Touch, I remember touch.

Pictures came with touch.

A painter in my mind.

Tell me what you see.

Immediately, the song frames touch as something forgotten, something once experienced but lost over time.

This suggests this entity wasn't always so disconnected from humanity, that perhaps over time, it drifted further and further toward the technological end of the spectrum, becoming increasingly robotic, increasingly detached from touch and emotion.

This is very much like the restless figure Pharrell addressed on the previous track Lose Yourself to Dance.

And this is where the two songs seem to connect narratively.

Because in my reading of the sequence, the euphoric ending of Lose Yourself to Dance wasn't necessarily something the robot literally experienced, but rather it was a dream or fantasy or a buried memory of human sensation.

And it's that imagined or remembered experience that seems to trigger the awakening at the start of Touch, jolting this dormant entity back into consciousness.

And once awakened, a flood of touch-based memories come rushing back into the narrator's mind, as though it's suddenly remembering a former life.

Our narrator's memories trigger an identity crisis.