Yung Sham
PhilaMOCA
531 N 12th St.
Philadelphia
Sept. 18, 2024
Yung Sham stumbled between songs, searching for a lost paper.
“I have the lyrics written down somewhere,” he told the audience.
Seconds later, he grabbed a slip off the floor and informed us: “Oh, it was under another piece of paper!”
The lyric he had forgotten was “let’s fall in love.”
He may not have known the words by heart, but Yung Sham, aka 25-year-old Elijah Sheppard, has a lot of musical love to give without getting too serious.
Sham performed a trove of short songs, primarily unpublished pieces about romance and heartbreak, at PhilaMOCA Wednesday night as the opening act for fellow Philly bands A Country Western and headliner Webb Chapel.
Sham combines a comically wholesome voice — blunt and simple like a less raspy Lou Reed impression — with a genuine talent for songwriting that translates to a self-effacing showmanship made for the stage.
The result is something like lo-fi Jonathan Richman. With Hooky frontman Sam Silbert on bass and flutist/keyboardist Melanie Kleid at his side, Sham pawed his foot out of time in the air while softly reciting lines like “you fill my cup,” “bury me in dreams,” “I wanna remember you,” “I know you’ll be waiting there for me.”
In between, he giggled under his breath at his own performance. He good-naturedly told his crowd, “Oh, sorry, sorry, I fucked that one up,” played some songs twice, declared “that was better that time, I thought,” asked Silbert to tune his guitar because “it has a capo on it, I don’t know how,” gently encouraged Silbert to take exaggeratedly blown-out bass solos, and subsequently declared “this is mad fun, honestly.”
In other words, Sham can make the heart of a venue swell by successfully bringing down the audience’s guard — before breaking out beautifully arranged, haiku-esque lullabies that surprise you with their sincerity.
Offstage, Sheppard sipped a cigarette while Silbert rolled up and pontificated to curious reviewers about his musical influences: “The Beatles, Neil Young, My Bloody Valentine.” Nick Cave, Lou Reed, Bob Dylan. “I really like the artists who do whatever the fuck they want. That’s beautiful! That’s what rock n’ roll is.”
That’s what Yung Sham seems content to do. He’s been playing shows in Philly since he was 16 years old. Before the pandemic, he and his keyboardist traveled to Europe for a series of gigs, where he romanticized “16 hours drives, some in total blackness through the highways of Europe,” and embodying a certain “alien quality” while playing for crowds much smaller and older than his usual audience.
What echoes as old in Europe felt fresh and alive at PhilaMOCA, even a decade after Sham’s teenage start.
Why, I wondered, would Sheppard call himself Yung Sham when he could go for a name like “International Star” instead?
“Someone called me a sham once and I guess it stuck,” he said.
Eager to look up recorded version of the songs I’d just heard, I asked Sham for his setlist. He pulled a crumpled sheet of paper covered in illegible drawings out of his pocket. Not the right piece of paper.
“Shoot, I think I forgot it on stage,” he said. “They’re all new songs anyway.”
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Find out what Yung Sham is up to next by following him on Instagram here.
