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This is probably the best article I've ever read about Karen Carpenter's singing...

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The Stuff Of Dreams: Karen Carpenter's Voice
by Chris Jones for the Chicago Tribune 

The other frigid night, I sat alone on the snowy street outside my house listening to Karen Carpenter sing "I'll be Home for Christmas" on my car radio.

I love that voice.

It hit notes with such surety. Its evocative lower register had a richness that no female pop singer ever has matched. But most important of all, it was such a guileless instrument.

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Carpenter sang without attitude -- but also without excessive sentiment. In other words, her voice was at once incredibly beautiful and strikingly neutral.

Even when her brother's oft-cheesy arrangements and harmonizing fought hard against her honesty, Carpenter's singing always allowed for the transference of longing and desire.

And that's exactly what "I'll be Home for Christmas," my favorite song from this time of year, requires. First recorded in 1943 by Bing Crosby with the John Scott Trotter Orchestra, the lyrics first were intended as a kind of war-time fantasy, as if dreamed by a soldier stuck overseas and dreaming of home and hearth. The ultimate line of the song, after all, is a sad one: "If only in my dreams."

As with her other Christmas recordings, Carpenter's version was infinitely more complex.

Listen to her sing this Christmas ballad and you can hear a weary business traveler shoving past delays at O'Hare. You can sense a mother rushing back to her kids who count on her. And you can detect a lover desperate for a warm bed with someone in it.

All at once.

And although it's been nearly 25 years since Carpenter's death (at the age of 32), the recording will forever come with a certain sadness. Sometimes, it can feel like she's singing about a home where someone is missing for good.

Frankly, the impact of the song all depends on one's mood of the moment -- and at what point the listener is in their life. That was Carpenter's brilliance -- that coupling of certitude and pliability, that unique combination of eroticism and maternal comfort.

This is a song that revolves around a promise. And Carpenter's voice had the unmistakable sound of one who always kept her promises.

When I was single and lonely, this singer and this Christmas song evoked the home I wanted and the person I wanted in it with me. Now she -- and it -- make me think about the nature of my home and its place in my priorities. The world of the song is both a confirmation of what we have, and yet, given the frantic way life goes at this time of year, also an elusive dream.
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