Star Trek: Picard and Star Trek: Discovery composer Jeff Russo has offered up a few interviews over the past week, aligned to today’s release of the full Picard Season 1 soundtrack, and while much of his talks focused on influences and intentions behind the new show’s music, he also offered a few brief comments about other Trek projects on the horizon.

Speaking first with Flickering Myth, the composer weighed in on what he knows about the gestating Noah Hawley Star Trek film project, the next attempt at a big-screen franchise adventure first made public last winter.

As a longtime collaborator with Hawley on television series Fargo and Legion — and 2019 film Lucy in the Sky — Russo offered an excited reaction to the details he’s heard about the potential Trek film.

[Noah Hawley and I] have spoken about it, and we’ve talked what he is going to want from a musical perspective, and how to approach it, and what the story is looking like it’s going to be, which is extremely exciting to me. But it was not by design.

All of that was purely by coincidence, that I happened to be doing ‘Star Trek,’ but also happened to be a frequent collaborator of the next ‘Star Trek’ director.

He’s also a fan, and a good friend of mine, so when I started working on ‘Star Trek,’ we chatted about it, talked about it, had conversations about the storytelling, and the music, and the themes, and stuff.

He’s one to definitely talk about music with me, so when he called to say that his film was in the works, I was extremely excited.

[…]

There is absolutely nothing I can tell you… [except] for that it is really, really, really incredible. From what I have heard, it’s really, really thrilling.

While it’s still to be seen if Hawley’s film will materialize — plenty of other recent cinematic Trek projects have fallen through since Star Trek Beyond left theaters in 2016 — one project we know is on the way is the next season of Star Trek: Discovery.

Russo has been scoring the series since it debuted in 2017, and though he’s continuing his involvement with the upcoming third season, in a new interview with TrekMovie, the composer shared how the ongoing coronavirus pandemic is hampering the most important part of his role: getting the orchestra together to record his music.

I am writing the scores for the first, second, third, fourth and fifth episodes [of ‘Discovery’ Season 3]. We’re full speed ahead. They wrapped production like six weeks ago, maybe even longer.

I am not working at my studio. I am working out of my home because of the lockdown, where I am writing for the episodes as they come in. What it means for my ability to record with an orchestra, I can’t do it right now, but the moment that they let me, I will.

Russo’s role is just one part of post-production efforts impacting the return of Star Trek: Discovery this year; while CBS All Access did start promoting the next season’s story in last week’s teaser, having the world work from home is slowing down all aspects of the necessary finalization of Discovery’s 2020 episodes.

You can listen to Russo’s Star Trek: Picard Season 1 soundtrack here on Amazon, or here on Spotify, and here on Apple Music; Picard returns in 2021 and Discovery will beam down sometime in 2020.