tom petty

i was driving, must have been today, turned on the radio and they played tom petty's breakdown. it was stuck in my head so i listened to it at home, and found that he seemed to have a strange accent in the first verse.

to wit,

-he syllabifies so as to avoid coda /z/ in is and it's, pronouncing it as [s] in the next onset.
-/o/ is usually lowered
-/schwa/ in away is hypercorrected to [e]
-some diphthongs in stress position have their first portion significantly lengthened, and the second part is pronounced weekly, to give the impression of a monophthong. most notably in like i do, where both diphthongs are simplified to [a].

the net effect is that he sounds partly mexican.