"Taxi" is a song written and performed by Harry Chapin from his 1972 album Heads & Tales. Chapin debuted the song on NBC's The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson in 1972, which was followed by many calls and telegrams sent from viewers to NBC demanding that Chapin return to the show. It was the first time in the show's history that host Johnny Carson brought a performer back the very next night for an encore performance. "Taxi" thus front-lined his defining work. The single helped establish Chapin's musical style and fame, and as a result, many Chapin items featured taxi-related imagery. Legendary WMEX-Boston Radio Personality Jim Connors is credited with a Gold record for discovering Chapin and pushing his single "Taxi" to #24 on the Billboard charts, where it would last 16 weeks on the Hot 100, in the United States. Billboard ranked it as the #85 song for 1972. In Canada, the song reached #3.

The song tells the story of Harry, a cab driver, on a rainy night in San Francisco. He picks up a woman, his last fare for the night, and she asks to be taken to her home at 16 Parkside Lane. Harry finds the woman familiar at first, but she seems not to recognize him until after she looks at him in the rear-view mirror and glances at his hack license. It is then revealed that she is Sue, an old flame from Harry's youth.

In flashback, Harry remembers how he "used to take her home in [his] car" and also how they "learned about love in the back of a Dodge," adding, "The lesson hadn't gone too far." Sue had wanted to be an actress, while Harry was going to learn to fly (hinting at Chapin's earlier real-life experience at the United States Air Force Academy). Their relationship ended when Sue "took off to find the footlights" and Harry "took off to find the sky."

The middle section of the song features the bass player, John Wallace, in falsetto, singing the following lines, written by poet Sylvia Plath:

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