Vermont-born songwriter Anaïs Mitchell featured Justin Vernon in her 2010 “folk opera” Hadestown, casting the Bon Iver warbler as Orpheus to her Eurydice. Now he’s returning the favor by covering her tunes and enlisting her to open his current tour. It’s a move that, by rights, should help expand her audience beyond the core of folkies and Ani-philes (DiFranco being her other major high-profile booster), much as she’s been pushing the conventional parameters of modern folk with her epic, allegorical themes and, most recently, producer Todd Sickafoose’s lush, impressionistic arrangements. (Joanna Newsom is a convenient if imprecise reference point on both counts, as well as for her striking, deceptively girlish voice.) If Young Man in America (Wilderland) isn’t as expressly conceptual as its predecessor, it’s nearly as ambitious and, in its way, just as steeped in mythology; rife with parables of family, struggle, death and self-discovery set in a hardscrabble pastoral America that feels at once long past and all too present.

Sun., Sept. 16, 7:30 p.m., $29.50-$49.50, with Bon Iver, Mann Center, 5201 Parkside Ave., 215-893-1999, manncenter.org.