That's When

"That's When" is an acoustic country pop and indie folk ballad about the end and aftermath of a relationship: Swift's and Urban's characters contemplate how to reunite with one another.

[2][3] The decision followed a public dispute in 2019 between Swift and the talent manager Scooter Braun, who acquired Big Machine, including the masters of her albums that the label had released.

[6][8] Swift explained that these songs were left out of Fearless for various reasons and that including them on the re-recorded album proved that "the artist is the only one who really knows that body of work".

[12] Swift previously performed as an opening act at his Escape Together World Tour (2009) when promoting Fearless, and both of them collaborated on Tim McGraw's single "Highway Don't Care" (2013).

[14] On April 3, 2021, "That's When" was confirmed to be one of the "From the Vault" tracks after Swift teased it in a clip containing the title in scrambled anagram the day before.

The song was mixed by Serban Ghenea at MixStar Studios in Virginia Beach and was mastered by Randy Merrill at Sterling Sound in Edgewater.

[34] Bobby Olivier of Spin opined that the song was a "peek into an alternate universe" in which Swift never left Nashville and remained in her trajectory of having a career similar to that of Carrie Underwood or Miranda Lambert.

[25] Erin Browne from Vulture commended how Antonoff kept the song "twangy and country", which he thought those aspects made "That's When" faithful to the music of the original Fearless while also being equal to the album's re-recording.

Rolling Stone's Rob Sheffield and Vulture's Nate Jones ranked it at 234 and 224, respectively, in worst-to-best lists of Swift's catalog.

[32][44] Billboard writers believed that the song was the ideal "country post-breakup duet" and thought Swift and Urban had "magnificent" harmonies with each other.

[45] Sheffield wrote that the song's theme of forgiving someone for breaking their heart without reason was in the style of her tracks "Afterglow" (2019) and "Back to December" (2010).

[33] Steffanee Wang of Nylon said that the song had a "pretty" instrumentation and a catchy hook and thought Swift's and Urban's vocals worked well with each other, but opined that it did not have "the deeper substance in the songwriting that we've come accustomed to".

[46] Josh Kurp from Uproxx felt that "That's When" was a "fine song that fails to leave much of an impression",[47] while Jones believed that it was similar to "You Belong with Me" and that Urban added "a bit of country verisimilitude but not much interest".