Stardancer was the second solo album credited to American singer-songwriter Tom Rapp, the leader of folk-rock group Pearls Before Swine, and his first for Blue Thumb Records.

The group, including Art Ellis, Harry Orlove and Bill Rollins, appeared on three of the tracks on Stardancer, but on most of the songs Rapp was supported - as he had been two years earlier on The Use of Ashes - by Nashville session musicians, led by Charlie McCoy and supported by Steve McCord (who had previously been a member of one of Lou Reed's first bands, The All Night Workers).

The fierce anti-war song "Fourth Day of July", with its references to "the broken children of Vietnam", was widely played in "underground" circles of the time.

Several of the arrangements hark back to the psychedelic style of his earliest albums, such as Balaklava, with use of bell overtones and phasing.

Stardancer was not reissued on CD until June 2009, when it was released on the Lemon label, a subsidiary of Cherry Red Records in the UK.