Lakeshore Records digitally releases Jeff Russo’s soundtrack from the first season of Star Trek: Starfleet Academy, featuring the Rufus Wainwright cover of “San Francisco (Be Sure To Wear Flowers In Your Hair)” featured in the first episode. 
In many an interview, the creators of modern Star Trek streaming series that have already signed off, from Lower Decks to Prodigy, have noted that Paramount Plus provided them with no metrics, no ratings, and no feedback at all to shape the next season that was already being shaped in the writers’ room (assuming the hammer hadn’t already fallen). It was up to the people creating the stories to venture out into the wilds of the internet, announce their presence, and soak up both the adulation and the abuse that came their way.
Well that’s a hell of a way to run a creative enterprise (pun not really intended, but I will take full credit for it). (Add that to my very long list of reasons why streaming is the worst thing ever to happen to television.)
As a result, with Star Trek: Starfleet Academy feeling an awful lot like it’s the vanguard of the second wave of Star Trek to go directly to streaming, it also feels like the first show that has gotten to benefit from the hard-earned lessons learned by those shows that came before it. Adjustments have been made to the franchise’s course. The balancing act of legacy lore in the background, and how it’s used, feels a bit more refined (at least at the three-episodes-into-the-season mark). The balance of serious to quirky and/or comedic feels more fine-tuned. And the show is boldly venturing into untried territory – if it were a book it’d be classified as “young adult” – with some serious swagger. It’s a fun show, and immediately addictive, at least this past-his-prime old Trekkie.
And even Jeff Russo, who has been scoring streaming Trek already (all of Star Trek: Discovery, the first two seasons of Star Trek: Picard, and the standalone movie Star Trek: Section 31), sounds like he might have made a course correction as well. Sure, there’s stuff here that sounds a lot like his work on Discovery, and given that Starfleet Academy rides Discovery’s coat-tails into the 31st century setting, that’s earned. But there’s also more playfulness, and more of the musical kisses to the past that permeated (perhaps too much) the third season of Picard (which Russo did not score). Some of this stuff has something dangerously close to a contemporary beat. It’s a show about young people at the beginning of their Starfleet career tracks; it’s perfectly fine for the music to feel a bit younger too. (One can’t help but notice the presence of celebrity producer Dan the Automator in the end credits, getting a shout-out for additional music; I’m kind of hoping that maybe a further selection of his even-more-hip contributions is forthcoming, perhaps at the end of the season; nothing on this album is credited to him.)
The main title is a standout among all of the streaming era shows, with its balancing act between world-weariness and hope, and a tantalizingly brief hint of “Ilia’s Theme” from Star Trek: The Motion Picture topping and tailing it. The Goldsmith Admiration Society is present elsewhere too; “Arrival At Academy” pays tribute to the music from Kirk’s inspection of the refurbished Enterprise in The Motion Picture, but this track also hints at James Horner’s music from Star Trek II: The Wrath Of Khan as well. It’s not quite the Star Trek soundtrack jukebox treatment that Picard’s final season got, so it’s not over-Easter-egging the pudding.
Another thing that stood out here is that you’ve got a non-zero probability of hearing hints of military drum cadence in this show’s music, something that was strictly forbidden in the Rick Berman era’s scoring playbook. But this show deals more directly than any before it with the issue of whether Starfleet is a military organization (it is not), but the Academy shares grounds and facilities with a competing military academy, the War College, so there’ll be some drums. It’s an interesting departure that is likely to be a recurring flavor as the show progresses.
It shouldn’t be a shock to the system to get a song, with vocals, in a Star Trek soundtrack – that’s been a thing since the punk on the bus, and it’s stuck around: Hiroshima writing the song for Uhura’s Star Trek V fan dance, Roy Orbison and Steppenwolf needle drops playing Zefram Cochrane into his first warp flight, Data (and/or his daughter) singing “Blue Skies”, or the entirety of Subspace Rhapsody. But even with all of those highlights in the past, Rufus Wainwright’s cover of “San Francisco (Be Sure To Wear Flowers In Your Hair)”, a song written by John Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas and originally sung by Scott McKenzie in the 1960s. In its original incarnation, the song was a wistful hippy anthem, but here it’s blown up to grand scale with choral accompaniment and the same world-weariness that runs through the main titles, venturing into minor keys that weren’t a feature on the original recording’s landscape. It’s perfectly befitting the background setting of an Earth (and the entire Federation) recovering from over a century of very hard times, a recurring theme in the show’s stories and dialogue.
Star Trek: Starfleet Academy is proving, despite the long gestation period of modern TV in the streaming ecosystem, that the franchise can course-correct and improve, and the soundtrack is also full of evidence that the sound of Star Trek is continuing to evolve. There’s a lot of canned, pre-cooked hate being aimed at the show, but the truth is, Star Trek must start aiming at a younger audience, and get that age group accustomed to the taste of its progressive messaging. Truthfully, there’s little point in aiming the franchise at its aging ’90s fanbase anymore. We’re old. We’ve made up our minds on whether or not we admire and want to create a world that live up to Starfleet’s ideals… or, alternately, if we want to do anything but that while still trying to claim some affinity for the franchise (but hey, enough about certain staggeringly clueless government officials). It’s time to start directing Star Trek’s optimism, its hope, and its diversity toward an audience that is still deciding who they’ll be. Today is our fault. Tomorrow is theirs to choose. 
This is a show for them, with Star Trek’s heart still beating after every iteration that preceded it.
Even though the series is pitched at viewers much younger than me, I’m enjoying it – and its music – tremendously.
- San Francisco (Be Sure To Wear Flowers In Your Hair) vocals: Rufus Wainwright (2:46)
- Star Trek: Starfleet Academy Main Title (2:05)
- Suite for Caleb and Tarima (3:48)
- Star Trek: Starfleet Academy End Titles (2:34)
- San Francisco (Be Sure To Wear Flowers In Your Hair) (Alt Version) vocals: Rufus Wainwright (3:15)
- Ishaani (2:32)
- The Kid Is Trouble (2:47)
- We Have A Deal (4:14)
- Arrival At Academy (2:35)
- No, Cadet Master (2:25)
- Captain To The Bridge (1:24)
- We Are Back (3:18)
- Under Attack (3:07)
- Tell Fear…You Refuse (2:36)
- Medical Emergency (1:39)
- So We Meet Again (3:43)
- Welcome To The Academy (0:59)
- Schooled By Reno (2:40)
- Orientation (3:10)
- Humpback Whales (2:40)
- Goja V (2:24)
- Old Friends (1:59)
- New Strategy (2:38)
- Darem’s Apology (1:17)
- The Retaliation (3:01)
- Chancellor’s Address (1:20)
- Saying Goodbye (2:25)
- They All Left (3:54)
- Job Of An Emissary (1:55)
- A Song Of Prophets (5:31)
- Mystery Of Fate (2:58)
- Darem Unsealed (3:16)
- A Meeting Of Makers (1:57)
- School’s Out (0:59)
- In Perilous Flight (3:10)
- Stranger In The Crowd (2:22)
- Caleb Lashes Out (3:09)
- On Impulse (2:59)
- Find An Answer (1:53)
- Always Been You (2:35)
- Show Me (2:19)
- Step Into The Light (2:12)
- Surrounded (1:29)
- Homecoming (2:53)
- To Know The Past (1:13)
- With Steady Hands (0:58)
Released by: Lakeshore Records
Release date: January 16, 2026
Total running time: 1:57:22
2026 music review by Earl Green