I think Karen Carpenter has possibly the finest female voice captured on record.
It's all the more poignant given her deeply unhappy love life and her dysfunctional family.
Some artists manage to convey an impression, an essence of their emotional depth in the way they sing, feelings that can never be expressed verbally, because our spoken language is nowhere near finding definitive adjectives for the core of the human condition.
Karen Carpenter didn't put an impression of her soul into her vocals, she put it all in, every last bit.
I feel that every time I hear her sing.