I'm currently listening to Billy Joel's Glass Houses. I noticed that in one verse of "Don't Ask Me Why," he pronounces ask differently. More like aks than ask.
So I listened to it again and looked in the liner notes for the lyrics. In the verse in which he switches the pronunciation, he's differentiating between classes - the high class people who frequent hotels and have servants and the low class people who live on the streets. So his changing his pronunciation of ask is apparently supposed to reflect that difference.