Sufjan Stevens calls Oscars performance "one of the most traumatizing experiences of my entire life"

Sufjan Stevens made everyone cry with his performance of “Mystery Of Love” at the 90th Academy Awards, but no one, it seems, was weeping harder than the songwriter was on the inside. In a new interview with The Guardian pegged to his fascinating new album, The Ascension, Stevens called the evening “one of the most traumatizing experiences of my entire life.”

“I didn’t want to have anything to do with that world and that culture,” he said of the Hollywood A-listers for whom he was crooning. “I don’t want to be part of any room full of adults hemming and hawing over plastic trophies.” Not content to stop there, he dubbed the Oscars “a horrifying Scientology end-of-year prom” representative of “everything I hate about America and popular culture.”

This might sound jarring if you’re only familiar with Stevens’ bubbly, feel-good Illinois tracks, but it tracks with his recent comments—“I’m inherently a pessimist,” he told The Atlantic earlier this month—and with the themes of The Ascension, an album rooted in anxiety over the impact celebrity worship has had on American politics. “What gives me hope? Oh God. Diazepam! Lithium!” he cracked to The Guardian.

Stevens also addressed the “naivety” of his bright-eyed, bushy-tailed early work, smirkingly noting, “Experience makes fools of us all.”