Songfacts®:

• "Iced Honey" is a track from Lulu, a collaboration between heavy metal heavyweights Metallica and the art rocker Lou Reed. The album is based on Reed's reworking of a musical that he'd written, inspired by German expressionist writer Frank Wededkind's plays from the early 1900s, Earth Spirit and Pandora's Box.
• For Metallica, the words normally are penned after the music, but since the lyrics for Lulu were already written when recording began, the band were able to play to the lyrics, a process they found liberating. "It offered us an incredible opportunity to do something that had no boundaries around it," drummer Lars Ulrich told The Guardian. "We could concentrate on playing."
• Other groups might have shirked at a role of a backing band, which is to some extent what Metallica found themselves doing on Lulu, but Ulrich told The Guardian he relished the opportunity. He said, "I didn't know we were going to be so involved on a creative level. I was perfectly happy in a perverse way to be a backing band, because that's something we've never done."
• A video for this track was shot in the San Francisco Bay area and directed by Darren Aronofsky, best-known for his Oscar-nominated films The Wrestler and Black Swan. Ulrich said that working with Reed and Aronofsky was a monumental chapter in his life. He said: "As if making a record with Lou Reed is not enough, now I get to make a video with Darren Aronofsky, who has been among my very favorite filmmakers since his first movie, Pi."
• Metallica vocalist James Hetfield said on Marc Maron's WTF podcast that the collaboration with the Velvet Underground singer came about when Lou Reed yelled at his band at a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame event. "Hey, Metallica, you guys, we should do an album together one day!" Reed shouted.
• Lou Reed proposed the collaboration with Metallica, but he had second thoughts when they got together to make music. Metallica's in-house journalist Steffan Chirazi saw it go down. He told the story on the Songfacts Podcast:
  
  "When Lou Reed walked into the rehearsal room at SIR in New York, he walked in and turned around and walked out. He was like, 'f--k this.' He just was switched off to it."
  
  Metallica's engineer, Big Mick Hughes, acted as a mediator and got Reed into the room, where he gave it a go. "hey played, and within half an hour, the smile on Lou Reed's face was wider than the building," Chirazi said.