Elisa

Not at all books - but this is a music blog too. Via Yahoo! Answers I just ran into Elisa Toffoli (who sings as Elisa ... official website). Her work, such as Dancing (above) is extremely nice; unusually for an Italian singer-songwriter, she mostly performs in English.

But I'd never have guessed her background; until the final "Grazie" in the above video, I would have thought her accent American (she sounds rather like Alex Winston), French-Canadian or Irish. The inconsistent rhoticity is interesting: check out the strongly rhotic "r" in words such as "far" (0:42) and "scared" (2:43) versus the completely non-rhotic "tears" (1:27) and "arms" (3:07).  It must have taken considerable work to develop this pronunciation, as this video interview shows her speaking voice in Italian to use the entirely different trilled and flap r, and Italian singers (as far as I can tell) preserve this when singing in Italian (check out examples from Andrea Bocelli and Mina).

- Ray