Nate Patrin is a longtime music critic whose writing has appeared in dozens of publications, including Pitchfork, Stereogum, Spin, Bandcamp Daily, Red Bull Music Academy, and his hometown Twin Cities’ late alt-weekly City Pages. His first book, Bring That Beat Back: How Sampling Built Hip-Hop (Minnesota, 2020), was named a Best Music Book of 2020 by Kirkus and Rolling Stone.
"""Music writing and film writing are seldom as accessible and as rigorous as they are in Nate Patrin’s The Needle and the Lens—never mind in the same package and carrying the same weight. As he persuasively argues from first example to last, cinema after rock has often used existing recordings to ends that transform both, in terms cinematic and real-world alike. This sharp, humane book’s gift is in never losing sight, or focus, of either.""—Michaelangelo Matos, author of Can't Slow Down: How 1984 Became Pop's Blockbuster Year"